John Berger: From Life
British LibraryNW1
Talk · Talk
In 2010 John Berger gave his archive to British Library: a kind of homecoming to the city of his birth, after a life lived mostly in self-imposed exile in Switzerland and France.Tom Overton got to know Berger as he catalogued this archive, and exchanges between them were a journey of discovery and rediscovery. Now, in an extraordinary new book, Overton draws on this experience and a vast and previously unseen trove of material to explore John Berger's life and work one hundred years after his birth.There were so many different subjects to Berger’s work; so many precisely chosen forms. He reimagined the relationship between art and technology; charted the disappearance of peasants and documented migrant labour; explored with huge compassion the AIDS crisis; was trenchantly opposed to the new world order that emerged in the 1990s and the War on Terror and was passionately committed to the Palestinian cause.Join us at this event to launch John Berger: From Life where Tom Overton talks to Gareth Evans about the continued importance of a figure who always focused on the creating and recreating of communities past and present. At the centre of this book, above all, is the idea that John Berger wants our company, and we need his.
