Field of View

A representative collection of essays, on par with "Ways of Seeing" The perception and imagination of looking have always been the primary way to understand the world. Love and passion, death, power, labor, experiencing time, history— These threads run through the entire book, driving the perspectives through which we look. This book is a representative collection of essays by John Berger, covering the widest range of time, writing styles, and subjects. By focusing on the concerns of this collection, one can understand the trajectory of his work. It clearly shows us what forces are behind most of his works. Love and passion, death, power, labor, the experience of time, and the nature of current history: these themes that run through the book are not only central to Berger's work but also the most pressing issues of our time. Travel and migration, dreams, love and passion, death, art as action and creation, and the relationship between linguistic and manual labor. Themes related to works of art, the function of art, and the work of art production provide a natural focus for Berger's essays. From the Renaissance to the Hiroshima atomic bomb, from the Bosphorus to Manhattan, from a woodcarver in a small French village to Goya, Dürer, and Van Gogh, from private experiences of love and loss to the great political upheavals of our time, this book encourages us to view our perspectives with the same focused and ardent, sensitive and rebellious, sorrowful and persistent gaze as the author. The profoundly influential "The Moment of Cubism" concretely demonstrates the flexibility and far-reaching nature of a Marxist-oriented research approach, writing not only about Braque, Léger, Picasso, and Gris but also about the incredible moment in the early 20th century when the world converged under a magical sense of promise. This article is included in the book as a highlight of Part Six, "The Act of Drawing." As for the themes of storytelling and language, in Berger's life and work, they represent an even more all-encompassing and pervasive concern. Part Two, "Leaving Home," introduces the three themes of travel, exile, and migration; these reflections continue in "The Unfinished Journey" near the end of the collection. All the essays in Part Four, "The ABC of Love," demonstrate Berger's focus on artistic creation and specific paintings, exploring a range of artists' unique experiences of love and passion, while "Strasbourg Night" records Berger's thoughts on passion while writing the screenplay for "Into Their World." Five articles of different materials and varying contexts form "Farewell Photography," which discusses death; in each, it is clear that death belongs not only to the past—the dead never bury the dead—but also to the present and future.