Since its release, John Berger’s landmark television series and book, Ways of Seeing (1972), has been a consistent favourite of students, curators and artists alike. His accessible reinterpretation of Walter Benjamin’s ideas, notably in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), which appeared 50 years ago this year, unlocked a means through which everyday people, not just academics or scholars, could access ideas of artistic representation, reproduction and image construction. Though Berger continued to produce aeons of fascinating material throughout his career, it’s Ways of Seeing to which people routinely return as a blueprint for interpreting how images old and new structure our understanding of ourselves and how we want to be seen. Here Jeremy Millar, return to Berger’s text and series to revisit its influence on photography.