John Berger

Seeing comes before words, and for John Berger it also came before the acceptance of easy flattery. The man who opened Ways of Seeing with that observation in 1972 spent fifty years training a critical eye on images—oil paintings, photographs, advertisements, peasant fields—asking whose interests each one served and whose labor each one concealed. His method was not cynicism but a form of demystification: strip the aesthetic reverence from the object until the social relations that produced it become visible. That method is now more urgently necessary than it was when he invented it, because the AI tools celebrated in The Orange Pill reproduce the same structural operations that Berger identified in the European aesthetics of possession—smooth surfaces, concealed labor, and a gaze that presents a specific way of seeing as though it were no gaze at all. Berger lived the last decades of his life among peasant farmers in the French Alps, writing the trilogy Into