The Shape of a Pocket

No other collection by John Berger, the British art critic and writer, winner of the Booker Prize, speaks of art and politics with such a desire for change.

Berger himself called “The Shape of a Pocket” (2001) very personal and written with a sense of urgency. With his characteristic attention and critical eye, Berger writes about the works of Bosch, Rembrandt, Degas, Kahlo, the Fayum portrait and rock paintings, through which he finds forms of reflection on the suffocation of the present, economic inequality and claustrophobia of the globalized world.

The essays from 1991–2000, collected under one cover, strive to resist the errors of the modern world and seek the possibilities of other spaces and other worlds, one of which is the space of the pocket between reader and author.