John Berger was born a hundred years ago today, and the problem with celebrating him is the same problem that plagued understanding him in life: which Berger are you talking about? The art critic who rewired how a generation looked at paintings? The Booker Prize-winning experimental novelist who donated half his prize money to the Black Panther movement? The documentarian of migrant labour, the collaborator with Jean Mohr, the prose stylist who could compress a lifetime's wisdom into a hundred pages? The diversity of his output is not a marketing inconvenience — it is the point. The natural entry point remains Ways of Seeing (1972), and the recommendation holds. This is not a book you read so much as a book that reorganises how you look at everything afterward. Berger combined art criticism with social analysis — advertising, the male gaze, mass reproduction, social status — in a format that itself made the argument: the text begins on the cover, three of seven chapters contain images only. It is a sui generis design classic and a swift introduction to Berger's enduring preoccupations with art, sex and politics. If you read nothing else, read this. For writers specifically, the lesser-known Photocopies (1996) is the secret weapon. Prose vignettes titled as photographs, capturing real moments with pinpoint attention. Berger called the act of writing a form of reproduction — photocopying the world — and the book earns that claim. It has an air of delicate stillness that is rare in criticism and rarer still in anything that gets shelved near criticism. It is a masterclass in clarity. The two Mohr collaborations — A Fortunate Man (1967) and Another Way of Telling (1982) — deserve to be read as a pair, fifteen years apart, the same friendship deepening its theory of images. A Fortunate Man is a portrait of a country GP in the Forest of Dean that becomes, through stark photography and Berger's prose, a meditation on the whole of society. Another Way of Telling, their third collaboration, is landmark work on photography that sits alongside Benjamin, Barthes and Sontag — a claim that lands because Berger earns it rather than claims it. G. (1972), the Booker winner, has been somewhat overshadowed by Berger's acceptance speech, in which he pilloried sponsor Booker McConnell Ltd for their Caribbean trading interests and donated half his prize money to the British Black Panther movement. The novel itself — an experimental work following a young man's sex life across pre-WWI Europe, oblivious to and inextricably connected with world-historical events — deserves its own attention. But if you want Berger the novelist at full stretch, go to To the Wedding (1995): a mother and father, estranged for years, travelling separately across Europe toward the wedding of their daughter Ninon. Through fragments of conversations, songs and silences, it is both heartbreaking and triumphantly optimistic about love and life. Colum McCann called it 'one of the greatest and most honest love stories of our time,' and that is not an overstatement. Here Is Where We Meet (2005) is Berger at his most playful, and the most underrated item in the catalogue. In eight-and-a-half chapters, 'John' has encounters with people who are dead — his mother on a bench in Lisbon, his childhood mentor in Krakow, standing above Borges's grave in Geneva. It is simultaneously novel, essay, criticism, memoir and travelogue, and it refuses to stay in any of those categories long enough to be pinned. If you want to understand why Berger's admirers tend to evangelise with that particular urgent quality, start here. And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984) — slim enough for a jacket pocket, concerned with mortality, art, sex and belonging — is the book you give someone you love, which is a different kind of recommendation altogether.
