It has been half a century since an English writer made a series of four films, and then made a book from them. We know that it revolutionised ways of looking at art, and also at humans. Ways of Seeing was published two years before I was born — I would first read it only 25 years later. It did not seem to matter to anyone, in those remaining years of the last millennium, that this was a book by a European man, using examples only from European art, focussed only on humans. It didn’t — couldn’t have, such were our frames in the last millennium — occur to anyone to ask the wayward question: How many trees are there in Ways of Seeing? The answer is none, of course — what does that say about our ways of seeing? John Berger would have been 100 years old this year; his ways of seeing — that Matthew Hall has, in a different context, diagnosed as “plant blindness”, the socio-optical conditioning of the human species to not notice plant life around them — are not........

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