Books like Ways of Seeing by John Berger

Thomas Hobbes' influential work on social contract and political governance from 1651, addressing the structure of government and society as the way to prevent civil war and chaos.

A seminal collection of essays by Susan Sontag that examines photography’s history, meaning and role in capitalist societies.

John Berger explores how perception shapes art, culture and everyday life, questioning why images affect us and how meaning evolves over time.

Rudolf Arnheim’s classic applies modern psychology to art, explaining how visual perception organizes and interprets artistic images. It offers a clear, readable guide for both psychologists and art lovers.

"A major new book from one of the world's leading writers and art critics One of the world's most celebrated art writers, John Berger, takes us through centuries of art revealing his fascination with the artist. In Portraits, Berger connects the artist and history in revolutionary ways, from the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet caves to Cy Twombly's radical work. In his penetrating and singular prose, Berger presents entirely new ways of thinking about artists both canonized and obscure, from Rembrandt to Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock to Picasso. Throughout, Berger maintains the essential connection between politics, art and the wider study of culture. A beautifully illustrated walk through many centuries of visual culture from one of the contemporary world's most incisive critical voices"--

"When these essays first appeared in Artforum in 1976, their impact was immediate. They were discussed, annotated, cited, collected, and translated - the three issues of Artforum in which they appeared have become nearly impossible to obtain. This edition also includes "The Gallery as a Gesture," a critically important piece published ten years after the others." "O'Doherty was the first to explicitly confront a particular crisis in postwar art as he sought to examine the assumptions on which the modern commercial and museum gallery were based. Concerned with the complex and sophisticated relationship between economics, social context, and aesthetics as represented in the contested space of the art gallery, he raises the question of how artists must construe their work in relation to the gallery space and system." "These essays are essential reading for anyone interested in the history and issues of postwar art in Europe and the United States."--Jacket.

This text considers the problem of visuality not through the study of art works and images, but by analyzing the historical construction of the observer. The author insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. In this context, he examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture.