Another year draws to a close, and I reflect on the usual failure to dutifully follow my "Must Read" list. Consequently I'm putting this up here as a prompter, "read John Berger's Ways of Seeing!". My former academic supervisor, currently handling a proposed journal article of mine with kid gloves so it seems, told me a few weeks back that the university library has the original BBC series on video, ready made as a teaching resource for the course he co-teaches with the chap responsible for the piece on the history of Australian electronica, which was earlier posted on this blog. Unfortunately, I'm not so well resourced, and my borrowing/viewing privileges have now lapsed at that venerable institution. I spent some time yesterday scouring the Net for any clips of Ways of Seeing, but came up empty handed. Sure, there's stuff available from a more recent series featuring Berger, which has to do with scientific creativity, another way of seeing I suppose, but I don't know at this stage how complementary it might be with my other interests in Joel Peter Witkin, Gunther Van Hagen, visible human project, as [possible] symptoms of our bioculture (for starters, I'm not sure off the top of my head if Berger talks to any biologists in the series, letalone how sympathetic the featured scientists are to the holistic systems building form of science most germane to the growth of a bioculture). I'd really like to test Berger's hypotheses, and certainly this seems plausible, in light of the reverential tones with which the accompanying book of the same name is still spoken of today in the circles of cultural sociology (I can't speak for cultural studies).
I've had to settle instead for posting a couple of sections from the series Vile Bodies which concentrated on Witkin. I also found a good overview of Berger's lasting influence which I thought worth archiving here as well:
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