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. (1972) won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize.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. 1926) is an art critic, painter and novelist.born in Hackney, London. he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures.' By now he has. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: 'This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings. John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.'

It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. 'But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.'

Ways of seeing series