Ways of Seeing

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John Berger

Penguin, New York, 1990; originally published 1972, English

Nonfiction, Art and Cultural History

7.8 x 5 inches, paperback, 176 pages

ISBN: 9780140135152

Suggested Retail Price: $15.00

Seven essays that examine the relationship between what we see and what we know, based on a 1972 BBC television series about which the (London) Sunday Times critic commented: “By concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he [Berger] will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures.”

On 7 book lists

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Mark Fox

On Mark Fox’s Book List

This slim but dense book explores the relationship between art, advertising, desire, and capitalism. One of my favorite passages exposes the sociopolitical dimension of advertising, using the British term publicity: “Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice.” A seminal work.

Milton Glaser

On Milton Glaser’s Book List

Berger is incapable of writing without astonishing you.

Alexa Hampton

On Alexa Hampton’s Book List

I read this book as a freshman at Brown University and it introduced me to a new way of looking at images. It’s an interesting text.

Angus Hyland

On Angus Hyland’s Book List

Provides what its cover says.

Jennifer Morla

On Jennifer Morla’s Book List

Ian Ritchie

On Ian Ritchie’s Book List

I saw a couple of the BBC programs that were delivered by John Berger and was astonished at his insights and lucidity. I have since read many of his books, the latest being Railtracks—a wonderful poetic conversation and photographic adventure.

Véronique Vienne

On Véronique Vienne’s Book List

. . . Influenced by Walter Benjamin‘s seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, [Ways of Seeing] attempts to expose a conspiracy that has kept the work of artists, and the ideologies their images promote, out of the political discourse. Adapted from a four-part BBC television series, it is a direct transcription of Berger’s script, and it reads as such, as a series of declarative sentences and short emphatic statements. A British painter as well as a novelist, a poet, and art critic, Berger speaks confidently about topics that are familiar to him. His point of view is always based on experience—on what it feels like to paint, observe, touch, watch, look, see, and be seen. . . . View the complete text

Oddly enough, what I find most appealing about this slim paperback is its awkward layout. Set in Univers 75 black, the heavy text jars you out of your comfort zone, frays your nerves, and wears down your resistance with short forcible sentences, until you surrender, bleary-eyed and furrowed brow, to the logic of its Marxist and feminist analysis.

To illustrate the various arguments made by the author, muddy black-and-white reproductions of Western masterpieces consort with tacky advertising images from the early 1970s, a dreadful period in terms of aesthetics. None of those visuals are captioned, though some are identified in the margins. Yet, somehow, for reasons I will try to explain below, Ways of Seeing is a marvelous book.

Influenced by Walter Benjamin‘s seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, it attempts to expose a conspiracy that has kept the work of artists, and the ideologies their images promote, out of the political discourse. Adapted from a four-part BBC television series, it is a direct transcription of Berger’s script, and it reads as such, as a series of declarative sentences and short emphatic statements. A British painter as well as a novelist, a poet, and art critic, Berger speaks confidently about topics that are familiar to him. His point of view is always based on experience—on what it feels like to paint, observe, touch, watch, look, see, and be seen.

For him, a masterpiece by Frans Hals is a record of what it must have felt like for the destitute old Dutch painter to portray dour rich folks who looked down on him as a pauper. He argues that the painting is not, as some art critics would have us believe, “a wonderful depiction of the human condition”—a statement he dismissed as yet another sanctimonious art appreciation platitude.

On the chapter of women’s place in the visual culture, he is even more adamant. “A woman must continually watch herself,” he writes. “She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.” Traditional art museums are filled with paintings, sculptures, and drawings documenting the way men look at women: as possessors, collectors, masters, lechers, voyeurs, and judges. Apparently docile and compliant, the gorgeous creatures portrayed in the buff are the reflection of this masculine sense of entitlement.

Though he admires the skills of artists who can move us with masterful representations of beautiful things, Berger insists that the main reason rich merchants collected—and still collect—priceless art pieces is “to demonstrate the desirability of what money could buy . . . how it will reward the touch, the hand of the owner.”

Ten years before he elaborated the script of the Ways of Seeing series, Berger had voluntarily exiled himself to an isolated rural community in France where he was able to observe and write about farmers and migrant workers. This could explain why the design of the book is so raw and gritty. Berger tracks ideas the way peasants push their plow. He leaves no clump of dirt unturned, and only stops when our field of vision is completely covered with deep parallel furrows.

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