I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.

I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour.

John Berger

John Berger is a storyteller, essayist, novelist, screenwriter, dramatist artists and critic, whose body of work embodies his concern for, in Geoff Dyer's words, "the enduring mystery of great art and the lived experience of the oppressed."

He is one of the most internationally influential writers of the last fifty years, who has explored the relationships between the individual and society, culture and politics and experience and expression in a series of novels, bookworks, essays, plays, films, photographic collaborations and performances, unmatched in their diversity, ambition and reach. His television series and book Ways of Seeing revolutionised the way that Fine Art is read and understood, while his engagement with European peasantry and migration in the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours and A Seventh Man stand as models of empathy and insight.

Central to Berger's creative identity is the idea of collaboration, with people, places and communities as much as with other writers and thinkers. Democratic and open exchange is embedded into his project, and among those artists with whom he has worked are some of the most imaginative in their fields - theatre director Simon McBurney of Complicite, the late artist Juan Munoz, photographer Jean Mohr, composer Gavin Bryars and film-makers Mike Dibb, Alain Tanner and Timothy Neat.

Due to the range of his work in all media, the totality of John Berger's achievement is often overlooked. His internationalist perspective, and refusal to be contained within narrow definitions of what might constitute the life of a writer, has meant that few perhaps have encountered the full body of work. His book Here Is Where We Meet places this unique oeuvre in context, and through it to consider what it means to be a committed artist in a rapidly changing and challenging period of our history. 

Taken and adapted from www.johnberger.org 

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