Ways of Seeing - John Berger - Part 1

Ways of Seeing - John Berger

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 134

  May 14, 2017 

Book 38 - Ways of Seeing
John Berger (1972)
 Part 1 - pages 5-82
Reading Time - 1 hour

This book is actually on my official 2017 Reading Challenge List! Hooray!! It's a strange book though... with a lot of images of art work. The idea, which is intriguing, is that there are an infinite number of view points for something. For example, a family photograph is shaped by the eye of the picture taker. Whoever the photographer is, decides when to take the photograph and sets up the camera and what image fills the view finder. It begs the question... is any photograph or image really objective? Or are they coloured by the way of seeing that the picture-taker brought to the image?

The other idea is that how we view art is different today. We don't go to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa. We look at it online or in books, or on t-shirts. We don't value art for it's own merits, but more for how much it is worth, or who painted it, or something else. We come to art with preconceived notions and assumptions on: beauty, truth, genius, civilization, form, status, taste, etc.

The book is divided into a series of essays, some of which are made up purely of art images, mostly Renaissance. One essay dealt with the issue of how women are portrayed in Renaissance art - as nudes. The author argues that men "act" and women "appear". That women, at least in Western Society, are judged by how they appear... and that they judge themselves in relation to this as well. Most of nude Renaissance portraits have the woman staring out at the observer, usually presumed to be a man. Women are portrayed quite differently from men (even today) not because they are feminine, but because the ideal "spectator" is always assumed to be male... and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him. To prove the point, the author suggests that one look at any of nude art work and transform the woman into a man... notice the violence that the transformation does... not to the image... but to the assumptions of a likely viewer. Interesting experiment.