First broadcast in 1972 on BBC Two, Ways of Seeing was a collaboration between the writer John Berger and director Mike Dibb. Across a series of four half-hour episodes, Berger talked about how we look at art, and why it matters: "The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled ... The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe ... Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph ... Our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing". The programmes explored Walter Benjamin's ideas about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction; the female nude and the male gaze; oil painting, status and ownership; advertising, art and commerce. The book published to accompany the series has never been out of print and has had a profound influence on popular understanding of art criticism and visual culture.

To mark the 50th anniversary of Ways of Seeing, Radio 4 invites five writers to tell us about a work of art that is important to them, and to reflect on how Ways of Seeing influenced their own ways of looking at - and thinking about - art.

In today's episode, we follow Olivia Laing into the National Gallery on a rainy day after the third lockdown, where she is confronted by the first painting she has seen in person since the pandemic began. "It was this room that I’d wanted to be in for months, though I would have been hard pressed to explain why ... The painting’s status as a kind of body that had survived meant something to me at that moment, as a person housed in a newly perilous body, which its replication as a digital image, so freely available, so immaterial, did not."

Olivia Laing is the author of To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring, The Lonely City and a novel, Crudo. Her writing on art and culture appears in the Guardian, Financial Times, and Frieze. She’s written catalogue essays on a variety of contemporary artists, including Andy Warhol, Agnes Martin, Derek Jarman, Wolfgang Tillmans and Chantal Joffe. Her collected essays on art, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, were published in 2020. Her most recent book is Everybody: A Book About Freedom.

John Berger was a storyteller, a novelist, a painter, a poet, a critic, a screenwriter, a playwright. He died in 2017, at the age of 90.

Produced by Mair Bosworth for BBC Audio

Saint John the Baptist Returning to the Desert by Giovanni di Paolo is reproduced here by kind permission of The National Gallery Show less