“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

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About John Berger

English art critic, novelist, painter and poet

John Berger was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. He lived from 1926 to 2017, and spent more than fifty years in France. He is best known for his writing on art and for fiction that won wide attention, especially his Booker Prize winning novel G. Berger’s essay collection Ways of Seeing, written alongside the BBC series of the same name, became a landmark in art criticism and is still widely read. His work moves between visual culture, fiction and poetry, often returning to questions of how art is seen and understood.

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Books by John Berger

A Seventh Man

1975

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Ways of Seeing

1972

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Hold Everything Dear

2007

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Pig Earth

1979

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