A Quick Analysis of John Berger’s Ways of

Seeing
November 25, 2012 · by cheurbs · in Beauty, Body Issues, Gender, Objectification. ·

La Grande Odalisque By: Ingres (1780-1867)

The whole book is based on the premise that the way we see things is affected by our knowledge
and beliefs. An image is a sight that has been recreated or reproduced. It is a set of appearances,
which has been removed from the place and time of its first appearance. Between 1500-1900 the
oil painting was main medium of visual art, from 1900 onwards the photograph became the main
medium of visual art. In parts of the book Berger addresses the way the portrayal of a women’s
body in art (painting and photographs) has changed over time from the Renaissance onwards. This
is the portion of the book I will be focusing on in this blog post. It is noteworthy to mention that
at times Berger is really blunt and sexist, but almost everything he says is true when you take into
account the historical context that he is referencing. Also, bear in mind that Berger is generalizing
when he is grouping certain types of art together to draw conclusions.

According to Berger, conventions have established the social presence of a woman as different
from that of a man. A man’s presence is dependent on the power that he embodies, while a
woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself and defines what can and cannot be done
to her. A woman’s presence is a manifestation of her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions,
clothes, chosen surroundings, and taste. A woman is forced to be self-conscious, eventually
resulting in conceitedness and vanity.

Sussanah and the Elders by: Tintoretto (1518-1594)

Sussannah is looking at herself in a mirror, thus joining spectators of herself.

Men look at women, while women watch themselves being looked at. In other words, the man is
a surveyor of the woman and consequently the woman is surveyed, thus turning the woman into
an object of vision, a sight. Pritty much what Berger is getting at is the historical objectification
of women by men.

Vanity By: Melming (1435-1494)

The mirror is hypocritically painted as the symbol of the subject’s vanity

In one group of European oil painting, the nude, women are the principal recurring subjects. In all
nude paintings like the one above it is apparent that the subject (a woman) is aware of being seen
by a spectator. The nude subject paints the female subject wit a mirror in her hand as a symbol of
her vanity. This of course is very hypocritical of the painter considering the fact that the painter,
usually a man is painting a naked woman for his own enjoyment and pleasure (he is getting a
chance to view the woman naked). Of course, due to fact that this statement is a generalization this
perspective conveniently forgets to acknowledge the fact the painter may be homosexual. In
contrast, non-European traditions (Indian, Persian, African, and Pre-Columbian art) the nakedness
of the woman is rarely portrayed in a passive way. Moreover, the nakedness usual portrays mutual
sexual attraction amongst a couple and the woman is shown to be just as active as the man.

Bacchus,Ceres, and Cupid By: Von Aachen (1512-1615)

Berger then goes on to distinguish between nudity and nakedness. Defining nakedness as being
seen as oneself, while nudity is being seen by others and recognized as an object instead of oneself.
Looking at photographs and paintings distinguishing a nude from naked portrait gets tricky. In the
traditional European oil painting, the nude, the principal protagonist (the painter) is never painted,
but what does gets painted is a result of what appeals to him sexually. Therefore a woman’s body
hair and fat dimples is never painted, since it is not sexually appealing to the painter. Moreover,
when a woman is depicted with her lover, her attention is rarely painted as directed towards the
male lover if one is present instead it is directed toward the spectator—the painter. Most Post-
Renaissance European oil paintings with sexual imagery are frontal, literally or metaphorically.
Of course there are exceptions, let’s not dwell. The oil-paintings of this era feature stark
nakedness.

The second half of his book discusses the ubiquity of imagery in modern 20thcentury life. He
discusses in detail the concept of publicity, which we accept as a normality of everyday life since
we are exposed to them on a daily basis. Today the female shopper is targeted as the ideal client
desired by an advertiser. Advertisers find material products like jewelry, clothing, and beauty
products are far easier to market to women than they are to men. Women are more encompassed
by glamour the false appeal created by an advertisement. Advertisements suggest to the client that
the purchase of this product will produce happiness, satisfaction, and most importantly the envy
of peers.

Sexuality is used as a mean of successfully marketing this alcohol

In photographs women are depicted in the following ways: serene mother, busy secretary, perfect
hostess, or sexual object. Advertisements make very use of sexuality and suggestive false product
outcomes. Lastly, Berger makes a fine distinction between black and white photography and
colored photography.

Thanks for reading, if you like what you read you can follow me on Twitter at DemelioU or you
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Demelio U.

Signing OFF
Ways of Seeing Summary
John Berger opens his seminal Ways of Seeing with an observation that seems counterintuitive,
considering its status as a written text: that, as we inhabit the world, we constantly perceive it,
only later naming the things we see, making language insufficient for conveying the way we see
the world. One way that people can recreate their way of perceiving the world is through images.
This term is used to describe paintings, photographs, films, or any other representation that
humans can construct, and it is assumed that every image externalizes its creator's way of seeing.
Another way of phrasing this: all images are encoded with ideology, regardless of whether their
creators consciously want them to be. From this premise, Berger explains how images have
layers of deeper meaning beyond what they show on the surface: they can offer a valuable
document of how their creator saw the world, but their underlying politics can also be obscured
or mystified in order to uphold the powers that be. Throughout the first essay in the book, Berger
draws heavily on the work of Walter Benjamin to explain how reproduction is one possible way
to change the meaning of images. Drawing on Benjamin, Berger argues that reproductions
impact images by bringing them into new contexts, opening up new (and often, more
democratic) possibilities for their interpretation. This is the core tenet of the first essay:
reproduction changes what images mean by circulating them in new ways and alongside new
ideas, breaking down the rarified narratives handed down from the elite that often seek to
stabilize our understanding of their meanings.

The second essay in the book is all in images—text appears only sporadically to attribute
paintings, and not all the images are attributed. They share a common subject matter: women.
Throughout the essay, women appear in paintings and photographs, across an apparently diverse
range of settings and times: photos of contemporary women at work, oil paintings of women in
the nude, and advertisements of women selling products are all reproduced side-by-side in this
essay. Berger never explicitly notes the connections between these images, leaving their
relationship open-ended.

Chapter 3 helps elucidate the relationships between the previous essay's images of women.
Berger begins the chapter by observing how, both in images and in society at large, men and
women are represented differently: men have agency, whereas women are mostly engaged in a
constant project of monitoring their self-presentation rather than focusing on external tasks. He
simplifies this by writing, famously, that "men act while women appear." This relationship, he
points out, is especially perceptible in a certain tradition of European oil painting, which often
depicts nude female figures. The women in these paintings aren't typically nude because it makes
sense for the narratives in which they're depicted; rather, their nudity is constituted by and for the
(presumably) male spectator. Women are painted to self-consciously exhibit their sexuality,
accused of vanity by the association with symbols like mirrors and beauty tools, yet they were
rarely the ones behind this representational tradition. Rather, women appeared nude for the
gratification of the paintings' owners, who were, for most of history, their primary spectators.
Although images proliferate more widely now, certain aspects of this representational tradition
remain, depicting women as passive or existing for male pleasure while men enjoy a more
diverse multitude of representations. Berger points out that this entire system of gender relations
is founded on a huge instance of hypocrisy: it presumes that the (male) spectator is a subjective
individual, while denying the (female) subject any individual agency. This hypocrisy can still be
seen in representations of women across media today, reinforcing just how prescient Berger's
Marxist-feminist analysis was, even over four decades ago.

Chapter 4 is another image-only essay. Unlike Chapter 3, where all the images were related by
their common subject matter, the images in Chapter 4 don't seem to be related in content. Rather,
a perceptive viewer might notice that they are all oil paintings or photographs with oil paintings
in them. Once again, the point being made here is effectively left open to the spectator. A
handful of possible connections between the images emerge--for example, oil painting is often
associated with wealth and excess across many of these images--but none is advocated for
certain.

Following the pattern of Chapters 2 and 3, Chapter 5 adds some new context that can help us
understand the unexplained images in Chapter 4. The essay focuses on a specific European
tradition of oil painting, spanning roughly between 1500 and 1900. Within this tradition, Berger
argues, the medium's capacity to paint objects extremely realistically and tactilely upholds the
logic of market capitalism, where to possess things is the ultimate goal. Because objects rendered
in oil painting are so deep and lustrous, they elicit a certain desire to touch—and, by extension,
to possess—their subject matter. By Berger's assessment, only a handful of masterful oil painters
from the period could escape this tradition; your average oil painting from the time functions as a
simple demonstration of what money can buy, glorifying wealth and thus upholding the power of
the ruling class that could afford to commission these paintings. It takes an immense effort and a
lifetime of training to ascend to the status of a master who, like Rembrandt, distances oneself
from this pattern, painting oil paintings with deeper meaning than just the glorification of
material possession.

Chapter 6 is another image-only essay, the final one in the book. Its images are even more
diverse than the first two, and they don't share an obvious connection in terms of subject matter
or medium. Among them, we see images referencing colonial conquest, oil-painted portraits of
wealthy subjects, pictures of domestic scenes, historical paintings, and photographs of children.
This chapter, with its lack of obvious structuring logic, encourages us to flex our image-reading
skills as encouraged by Berger in Chapter 1, imagining the possible relationship between these
seemingly disparate photos. No definite answers emerge—this is truly a free-for-all that you've
just got to look at yourself, hazarding a guess as to what these images might mean, comforted by
the fact that there's really no right answer.

Finally in Chapter 7, Berger departs from his analysis of art history to deal with a strictly
contemporary phenomenon: the advertisement, or "publicity image," as he calls it. Even at the
time of his writing nearly fifty years ago, images had begun to proliferate more than ever, with
advertisements accosting us around every turn. How do these advertisements work? According
to Berger, they manufacture glamour by making viewers envy the hypothetical future versions of
themselves that will become reality if they choose to buy a product. Herein lies the faulty logic
of consumer choice that often justifies advertisements: they posit that customers have a choice
between which products to buy, but making the choice not to buy seems unthinkable. In their
glorification of material property, ads work in the same tradition as oil paintings, celebrating the
private ownership of objects. Crucially, however, oil paintings were owned and seen by the
ruling class for most of art history, whereas advertisements surround everyone today. This
explains the largest difference in their functions: oil paintings reinforce the value of their owners'
preexisting wealth, while advertisements appeal to a spectator who is likely both a worker and a
buyer, upholding the system of market capitalism even more profoundly. They operate by
making viewers dissatisfied with their life as it is, suggesting that this dissatisfaction will
evaporate as soon as they buy the product on view. Through this analysis, Berger unpacks the
source of publicity images' power, elucidating one contemporary site in which the question of
images' underlying ideology persists.