“Lo stupore negli occhi dell’altro”. John Berger e l’immagine del desiderio

Abstract

For John Berger, visual culture is not a mere instance of the present.
In line with Bredekamp, Mitchell, Freedberg, Berger emphasizes how
visual culture settles in the past and has origins that connect with the
story itself of the image, with its cultural and social significance. The understanding
of an image is moreover connected to the perception of the
desire that it produces. In his works, the relationship between image and
desire concerns images of pictorial art, cinema, photography, but also
virtual ones produced by literature, poetry, music. For Berger, the gaze
is the correlation factor to understand what images produce in terms of
knowledge, identification, attraction. Reflecting on vision becomes a way
to observe our own desire, to investigate its hidden origins, and its ability
to withstand possible erosion factors.