12th of October - John Berger - notes and synopsis

John Berger - Ways of seeing

Seeing comes before words, and words can never quite describe it. Sometime the knowledge and explanation does not fit the sight. Like a sunset we see, we know why and how it happens, but seeing the sunset can not be described that way.

The way we see things is affected by what we know and believe. Like fire in the old days had a different meaning in the middle ages and now. The believe of a physical hell had common experience of pain of burns and ashes.

When in Love the sight of the beloved has no words. only making love can temporarily accommodate.

Seeing comes before words and is not a question of chemically reacting to stimuli. We only see what we look at which is an act of choice. Touch is a limited form of sight. Looking, which is never just at one thing, is always in a relation to ourselves.

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Images were at first made to conjure appearance of something that was absent. It then became evident that the image could outlast what it represented. It showed how things or somebody looked at a certain point - and thus the way other people saw it at that time - later how the specific vision of the image maker was a part of the record. There was an increasing consciousness of individuality and awareness of history. It is hard to date but in Europe this consciousness has existed since the beginning of Renaissance.

Images best represents a testimony of the world which surrounded people at other times - no writing or other documents can do the same as the image. Images are more precise and richer than literature. The more imaginative the work the more profoundly it allows us to share the artists experience of the visible.

When an image is represented as a work of art, the way we look at it is filled with learnt assumptions: Beauty Truth Genius Form Status Taste.etc.

The world we live in is more than an objective fact - it includes consciousness. History always constitute of the relationship between the present and the past. Art being remote / inaccessible means we are denied from history belonging to us. Like seeing a landscape, we automatically see ourselves in it, if we saw an art of the past we would place ourselves in history. The art of the past is being mystified, by only the elite few that can see it.