John Berger - Ways of Seeing

Essay One

Notes

The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.

We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. As a result of this act, what we see is brought within our reach - though not necessarily within arm's reach. We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen. The eye of the other combines with our own eye to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world. The reciprocal nature of vision is more fundamental that that of spoken dialogue.

An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced. It's an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance and preserved. Every image embodies a way of seeing. The photographers way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject. Yet, although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing.

Through an increased awareness of history and consciousness of individuality the vision of the image maker became part of the record. An image became a record of how X had seen Y. Not to deny the imaginative quality of art: the more imaginative the work, the more profoundly it allows us to share the artist's experience of the visible.

When an image is presented as a work of art, the way people look at it is affected by a whole series of learnt assumptions about art. Assumptions concerning: Beauty, Truth, Genius, Civilization, Form, Status, Taste etc -> these assumptions are no longer accord with the world as it is (the world including consciousness). A mystification of the past happens to justify the role of the ruling classes. -> Explanation with the help of paintings by Frans Hals. He as a very poor man portrays the regents. They say "if we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of the past."

"I'm an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a wold the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I'm in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse's mouth. I fall and rise with falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations. Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all point of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you." (Quotations from an article written by Dziga Vertov in 1923, revolutionary Soviet film director).

The camera showed that the notions of time passing was inseparable from the experience of the visual (except in paintings). What you saw was relative to your position in time and space. Before perspective organized the visual field: every drawing / painting that used perspective proposed to the spectator that he was the unique centre of the world - the (movie)camera demonstrated that there was no centre. The invention of the camera changed the way men saw. Before the camera a painting could never been seen at more than one place at the same time. When the camera reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image. As a result its meaning changes - it multiplies and fragments into many meanings. "This is vividly illustrated by what happens when a painting is shown on a TV screen. The painting enters each viewers house. there it is surrounded by his wallpaper, his furniture, his mementoes. It enters the atmosphere of his family. It becomes their talking point. It lends its meaning to their meaning. At the same time it enders a million other houses and in each of them is seen in a different context. Because of the camera , the painting now travels to the spectator rather than the spectator to the painting. It its travels, its meaning is diversified. The uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction. It is no longer what its image shows that strikes one as unique; its first meaning is no longer to be found in what it says, but in what it is. Consequently a reproduction, as well as making its own references to the image of its original, becomes ifself the reference point for other images. The meaning of an image is changed according to shat one sees immediately beside it or what comes immediately after it. Such authority as it retains, is distributed over the whole context in which it appears.

The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language for what purpose.

Synopsis Chapter One

Seeing

Berger starts by trying to explain the relationship between words and what we see. He points out that seeing and recognition come before words. It is seeing that establishes our place in the world, but we use words to explain this world. Despite this he argues there is always a distinction between what we see and what we know. The example he gives is that of us seeing the sun revolving around the earth but knowing the opposite. Having established that we see first and then use words to explain the world, i.e. what we know, he then goes on to say what we know or believe affects the way we see things. This makes it a dynamic relationship; it may start with seeing and recognition, but develops into a system in which our past experience or knowledge changes the way we see things. For example, today we would see fire differently from people in the Middle Ages who believed in the physical reality of hell. The act of seeing is active; it is an act of choice. We see what we look at and so relate to it. We also become aware that we can be seen, and so are aware we are part of the visible world. This results in the understanding that others may see things differently. This two-way (reciprocal) nature of vision comes before dialogue.

The Image

For Berger, ‘An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced ... which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance ...’ (p. 9). This detachment can be great or small, but all images, including photographs, involve a way of seeing by the person who has created the image. Further, when we look at someone else’s image, our understanding of it depends on our way of seeing. Berger argues that images were first made to represent something that was not there, and later acquired an extra level of meaning by lasting longer than the original subject. The image now showed how the subject had once looked to other people. Later still, with the increasing consciousness of the individual, the image was recognised as the particular vision of a particular artist. Nothing else documents the past so well, and the more imaginative the work, the more we can understand the artist’s experience of the world. Unfortunately, when images from the past are presented as works of art, their meanings are obscured (mystified) by learnt assumptions such as beauty, truth, form etc. Our understanding of history will always change as we change. However, this cultural mystification results both in making the images seem more remote, and allows us to draw fewer conclusions from history. When we see art from the past, we have the opportunity to place ourselves in history. The mystification is an attempt to prevent us from really seeing the image and so deprives us of our history. For Berger, this has been done deliberately ‘... because a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes...’ (p. 11). Berger gives as an example two paintings by Frans Hals; one of the Regents and the other of the Regentesses of the Old Men’s Alms House. At the time of painting, Hals was a destitute old man dependent on the charity of people whose portraits he now painted. Berger quotes from an authoritative art history that evaluates the paintings purely in terms of their formal elements, using phrases such as ‘... harmonious fusion ... unforgettable contrast... powerful whites...’ (p. 13). The history goes further and argues against the viewer thinking they can understand the personalities of the people portrayed. For Berger, this is mystification and he argues we can have an understanding of the personalities ‘... because it corresponds to our own observations of people ... [and] ... we still live in a society of comparable social relations and moral value’ (p. 14). For Berger, the relationship of the personalities, the destitute old painter and the people on whose charity he depends on is the essence of the painting.

The impact of photography

From the Renaissance onwards, perspective in art converged on the single spectator, who could only be in one place at a time. The implication was that images were timeless. Photography, in particular the movie camera, changed this. What you saw depended on your place in time and space. The camera changed the way artists saw. Impressionists saw the visible in continuous change [as the light changed so did the appearance of the object] and Cubists no longer recognised a single vantage point [so, for example, they would paint a face with an eye seen from one vantage point and the nose from another]. A second major impact was to destroy the uniqueness of images. Prior to photography, images were an integral part of a building, and as a result this was a part of the images’ meaning. Even if the image could be moved, there was always only one image. By reproducing the image, the camera multiplies and breaks up its meaning. It can be shown on your own lounge wall, on the television, or on a T-shirt. To argue that the reproductions will always lack something still leaves problems, because the uniqueness no longer resides in the meaning of the image, but in its unique physical existence. Its value lies now not so much in what it says but in its rarity and the price it would fetch. There is a conflict here because art is thought to be above commerce. Those who mystify art respond by claiming that the commercial value reflects the spiritual value; yet in modern society, religion is not the living force it once was. What determines an image’s value is not its meaning or quality of painting, but its uniqueness, and Berger cites the example of two almost identical paintings of the Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci. One is at the National Gallery and other at the Louvre. In both institutions, their art historians’ prime concern is not the meaning of the image but to prove that their image is the original and the other, the copy. Likewise, certain images take on new importance when their value increases. To hide this link between artistic value and market value, a false sense of religiosity is given to these works, so alienating most people from art. Reproduction detaches the meaning from a painting, and its meaning is to a greater or lesser degree changed. By selecting a part of an allegorical painting for example, it can be transformed into a portrait. A filmmaker can construct an argument by selecting parts of a painting and presenting them in a particular order. Presented with the painting itself, the viewer takes in the whole image in an instant, and, even when looking at a specific area, can always refer to the whole. The juxtaposition of words and images also changes the meaning. The meaning of an image will change depending on its context. The image could be used in advertising, often reconfirming the mystification of art, or someone could pin a reproduction on his or her pin-board, seeing something very personal in the image. Berger still sees a value in the original image. The original is silent and has traces of the painter’s actions, creating a closeness between the painter and the viewer, so making the painting, in a sense, contemporary. Berger feels a total approach to art is needed, one that relates art to everyone’s experience, including the innocently spontaneous and that of the art specialists. Art no longer exists as it did. It was once isolated, part of a hierarchy, but now images of art are available and insubstantial. Yet it is still presented to people in a mystified way and so alienates them, cutting them off from their history and making art a political issue.

Essay Three - The Nude

Notes

page 52: The judgement of Paris was another theme with the same inwritten idea of a man or men looking at naked women. But a further element is now added. the element of judgement. Paris awards the apple to the woman he finds most beautiful. Thus Beauty becomes competitive. Today The Judgement of paris has become the Beauty Contest. Those who are not judged beautiful are not beautiful. Those who are, are given the prize. The prize is to be owned by a judge - that is to say to be available for him. Charles the Second commissioned a secret painting from Lely. It is a highly typical mage of the tradition. Nominally it might be a Venus and Cupid. In fact it is a portrait of one of the Kings mistresses, Nell Gwynne. It shows her passively looking at the spectator. staring at her naked. This nakedness is not, however, an expression of her own feelings; it's a sign of her submission to the owner's feelings or demands. The owner of both woman and painting. The painting,demonstrated this submission and his guests envied him. It is worth noticing that in other non-European traditions - in Indian art, Persian art, African art, Pre-Columbian art - nakedness is never supine in this way. And if, in these traditions, the theme of a work is sexual attraction, it is likely to show active sexual love as between two people, the woman as active as the man, the actions of each absorbing the other.

page 56: Almost all post-Renaissance European sexual imagery is frontal - either literally or metaphorically - because the sexual protagonist is the spectator-owner looking at it.

page 63: In the art-form of the European nude the painters and spectator-owners were usually men and the persons treated as objects, usually women. This unequal relationship is so deeply embedded in our culture that it still structures the consciousness of many women. They do to themselves what men do to them. They survey, like men, their own femininity. ... Today the attitudes and values which informed that tradition are expressed through other more widely diffused media - advertising, journalism, television.

page 64: But the essential way of seeing women, the essential use to which their images are put, has not changed. Women are depicted in a quite different way from men - not because the feminine id different from the masculine - but because the ideal spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him. If you have any doubt that this is so make this experiment: Take a traditional nude and transform the woman into a man. Notice the violence which that transformation does. Not to the image, but to the assumptions of a likely viewer.

Synopsis of Chapter Three

The social presence of men and women

Berger points out that traditionally, men and women have different types of social presence. Men are measured by the degree of power they offer. The power may be in any number of forms, for example moral, physical, economic etc. A man’s presence suggests what he may or may not be able to do to or for you. In contrast to this, a woman’s presence indicates what can or cannot be done to her. Every thing she does contributes to her presence. She is born into the keeping of men, and from childhood is taught to survey herself, with the result that her being is split into two, the surveyed and the surveyor. Her own sense of being is replaced by a sense of being appreciated by others – ultimately men. He acts, she appears, and she watches herself being looked at. ‘The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.’

The nude in oil painting

Berger points out that women are the main subject in one category of European oil painting – the nude. The nude reveals how women have been seen and judged as sights. The first nudes in this tradition illustrate the story of Adam and Eve, usually as a series of images similar to a cartoon. For Berger, there are two important elements to this story. Firstly, having eaten the apple they see each other in a different way, so nakedness was in the eye of the beholder. Secondly, the woman is blamed and made subservient to the man by way of punishment. During the Renaissance the story disappeared, and instead a single moment was shown, usually the moment of shame. However, the shame is directed more at the viewer than towards each other. Gradually, the shame became a kind of display. Even when secular subjects began to be used, the implication that the woman was aware of being seen by the spectator remained. As a result she was not naked in her own right but naked as the (male) viewer saw her. Berger gives a range of examples. Nudes looking at the viewer looking at them; of women looking in mirrors joining in the spectacle of themselves; or of looking into mirrors and being accused of vanity, when in reality they are only satisfying men’s desire to see them naked; and of women’s beauty being judged. Common to all of these images is the sense of the woman being watched; by men in the painting; by herself; by the spectator towards whom her body is often turned.

Often, she looks at the spectator looking at her. Her nakedness is not an expression of her own feelings but that of the male viewer. This is in marked contrast to the art of other cultures where nakedness is not so passive and has a degree of sexual equality. At the time Berger produced Ways of Seeing, the most authoritative study of the nude was Kenneth Clark’s The Nude. Clark distinguishes between nakedness and nudity. For him, to be naked is simply to be without clothes. It has nothing to do with art. The nude, on the other hand, is an art form. The subject may be naked people, but the way they are painted makes them nudes, i.e. a way of seeing. [Berger does not make it clear, but Clark’s main concern was to deny the sexuality of the nude.]

Berger develops this distinction. ‘To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude.’

In the average oil painting of the nude, the main character is never painted; this is the male spectator for whom everything has been done. Berger illustrates this point with the Allegory of Time and Love by Bronzino. In the painting, Cupid is kissing Venus, yet the way their bodies are arranged have nothing to do with them kissing. Her body has been contorted to present itself to the male viewer of the painting. The picture appeals to his sexuality, it has nothing to do with hers. The image conforms to another European convention, that of not painting body hair on women. This is because hair suggests power and passion, and the male spectator must feel these are his characteristics. There are exceptions to the tradition, and Berger points out the characteristics paintings need, to be ‘. . . paintings of loved women, more or less naked’ (p. 57), rather than nudes. They need to transcend the moment, because for Berger, in a lived sexual experience, nakedness is a process rather than a state, so an image of any instant runs the risk of distortion. The images must be subjective, and finally they must have an element of banality (ordinariness). European humanism, which entails a strong sense of the individual, was a strong influence on European thinking during this time, yet the nude denied the individualism of the women portrayed. The reason for this was the contradictory interests of those involved in a painting: the patron, the artist and the model. Dürer, for example, believed the ideal nude ought to be constructed out of the parts of various bodies, so denying any sense of the individual at all. The spirit of individualism allowed some artists to resolve this contradiction, but the tradition as a whole did not.

Despite the notion of the ideal nude being broken by Manet’s Olympia, and replaced by the realism of the prostitute, the unequal relationship exploited by oil painting is still deeply embedded in our culture and shapes the thinking of many women. Today, the attitudes that created the nude can be seen in the mass media, and ‘. . . the essential way of seeing women, the essential use to which their images are put, has not changed’ (p. 64). The ideal spectator is still male and the image is designed to flatter him.

Essay Five - Oil Paintings

Notes

There is an analogy between possessing and the way of seeing which is incorporated in oil painting. ... What are these paintings? Before anything else, they are themselves objects which can be bought and owned. Unique objects. A patron can not be surrounded by music or poems in the same way as he is surrounded by his pictures. They show him his sights: sights of what he may possess. ... The art of any period tends to serve the ideological interests of the ruling class. Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became a commodity.