About the look

The collection of texts by the British art critic and writer John Berger "On the Gaze" consists of three parts: a program for animal studies essay "Why look at animals?" (1977) and two chapters of 22 texts (1966–1979) written mainly for the weekly magazine New Society (Great Britain), combined in this edition under the titles The Uses of Photography and Lived Moments. Berger writes about the long history of the relationship between humans and animals, shares his own reflections while reading Susan Sontag's book On Photography, writes about August Zander, Paul Strand and war photography, about the relationship between the body and landscape, examines the paintings of Courbet, Millet, Turner, Bacon, Magritte, and others — adjusting in these texts the view of a critic who looks at the works of art of the past from the perspective of his time and expresses the connections and gaps between personal experiences and history.