How long does it take to read About Looking?
About Looking by John Berger takes about 3 hours 38 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 3 hours 38 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1980. 198 pages, about 54,450 words.
8 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 6 hours 3 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 3 hours 38 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 16 minutes |
The page count is the median across 9 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
This successor to John Berger's <i>Ways of Seeing</i>, written over the last ten years, searches for meaning within and beyond what is looked at. Why do zoos disappoint children? Why do we take snapshots of those we love? How do the media use photographs of agony? When an animal looks us in the eyes, what does that look mean? Berger describes how a sixteenth-century masterpiece he saw in the 1960s comes to look different to him a decade later. He discusses how a forest looks to a woodcutter; how fields look to a peasant; how the world looks to a nineteenth-century barber's son; how New York looked to immigrants; and how each of these perspectives was reflected in the struggles of a particular painter. Every painting he considers, whether by Millet, Courbet, Turner, Magritte, Fasanella, or Francis Bacon, is evidence of an experience which belongs as fully to life as to art. (back cover copy)
Subjects: Art, Visual perception, Psychology, Meaning (Psychology), Arts, Waarneming
