Me: Seeing is a creative act
Jeroen Musch (2017)
When we appointed the photographer Jeroen Musch as the new Artist in Residence at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, we could not have known that the start of his term would coincide with the death of one of the most influential writers that has changed our idea of seeing, the English art critic John Berger, who died aged 90 on 2 January 2017. In his seminal essay Ways of Seeing he writes: “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world.”
Although Berger was initially concerned with how we perceive art, he quickly called our attention to the wider world and introduced looking as a political act that challenges us to exercise our sensibilities and to ask ourselves: ‘What do we see? How are we seen? Might we see differently?’ For Berger, the relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled, and therefore the act of looking becomes an effective tool to discover something (else) about ourselves and the situation in which we are living.