‘With the invention of the camera, everything changed,’ he notes, before adding, ‘It has even changed paintings painted long before it was invented.’ It is the camera which now crops Venus’s face and ‘an allegorical figure becomes a pretty girl anywhere’.

Although Berger opens this first programme by saying that he wants ‘to question some of the assumptions usually made about the tradition of European painting’, it is photography, and its sibling upstart, cinema, to which his attention turns almost immediately. Of course, it is not the National Gallery but a television studio, not the real Botticelli but a reproduction, each cut made possible by a camera. Moments later, another clean cut: an edit in the film to this same face on a postcard, and then on a sheet at a printworks, alongside other works – sketches and sculptures, landscapes and annunciations – all cut similarly from their frames and laid side-by-side. It is a knife that he takes, pointedly, to a canvas in London’s National Gallery in the opening moments of the first episode of Ways of Seeing, making a neat, violent crop of the goddess’s face from Sandro Botticelli’s Venus and Mars (c.1485). Many people have described the camera as a gun for Berger, it was also a knife. John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972, film still.

Here, curators Mariama Attah and Anna Frances Douglas, alongside tutor, artist and curator Jeremy Millar, return to Berger’s text and series to revisit its influence on photography. Though Berger continued to produce aeons of fascinating material throughout his career, it’s Ways of Seeing to which people routinely return as a blueprint for interpreting how images old and new structure our understanding of ourselves and how we want to be seen. His accessible reinterpretation of Walter Benjamin’s ideas, notably in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), which appeared 50 years ago this year, unlocked a means through which everyday people, not just academics or scholars, could access ideas of artistic representation, reproduction and image construction. Since its release, John Berger’s landmark television series and book, Ways of Seeing (1972), has been a consistent favourite of students, curators and artists alike.

Ways of seeing by john berger