Landscapes

Landscapes gathers writing from across John Berger's life, and it is the companion to his earlier collection Portraits. The pieces take several forms: essays, short stories, poems and translations. Together they trace how Berger came to see art the way he did, and what art can tell us about ourselves. Tom Overton's introduction frames the book as an invitation to reimagine and to look in unfamiliar ways.

Some of the pages are tributes to the thinkers and writers who shaped him, among them Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Bertolt Brecht. Elsewhere he moves through artistic movements and individual artists from the Renaissance to the present day. He never treats the work in isolation, and keeps returning to the social and political conditions in which it was made.

Berger writes more as a storyteller than a critic here, using an artist's eye to push art writing past its usual limits. Landscape works as a loose, freeing metaphor rather than a fixed category, and the book uses it to survey the aesthetic terrain that challenged and nourished his view of the world. Read alongside Portraits, it completes a broad tour through the history of art and asks readers to question what they assume about the part creativity plays in everyday life.