berger essay summary

How John Berger changed our way of seeing art

Reader in Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London

Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London

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Vikki Bell receives funding from Economic and Social Research Council

Yasmin Gunaratnam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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The opening to John Berger’s most famous written work, the 1972 book Ways of Seeing , offered not just an idea but also an invitation to see and know the world differently: “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled,” he wrote.

Berger, who died on January 2 at the age of 90, has had a profound influence on the popular understanding of art and the visual image. He was also a vibrant example of the public intellectual, using his position to speak out against social injustices and to lend his support to artists and activists across the world.

Berger’s approach to art came most directly into the public eye in four-part BBC TV series, Ways of Seeing in 1972, produced by Mike Dibb and which preceded the book. Yet his style of blending Marxist sensibility and art theory with attention to small gestures, scenes and personal stories developed much earlier, in essays for the independent, weekly magazine New Stateman (between 1951 and 1961) and also in his first novel A Painter of Our Time , published in 1958.

The BBC programmes brought to life and democratised scholarly ideas and texts through dramatic, often witty, visual techniques that raised searching questions about how images – from European oil painting to photography and modern advertising – inform and seep into everyday life and help constitute its inequities. What do we see? How are we seen? Might we see differently?

“Berger’s theoretical legacy”, the Indian academic Rashmi Doraiswamy wrote recently , “is in situating the look in the context of political otherness”. Berger’s idea that looking is a political act, perhaps even a historically constructed process – such that where and when we see something will affect what we see – comes across most powerfully in the second episode of Ways of Seeing – which focused on the male gaze.

Here Berger showed the continuities between post-Renaissance European paintings of women and imagery from latter-day posters and girly magazines, by juxtaposing the different images – showing how they similarly rendered women as objects. Berger argued that this continuity constrained how certain forms of femininity are understood, and therefore the terms on which women are able to live their lives. He identified a splitting of the European woman’s consciousness, in which she:

has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.

Historical context, scale, and how we see were recurring themes in Berger’s writing, films, performance and in his collaborative photographic essays with Jean Mohr , Anne Michaels , Tereza Stehliková and others.

Berger’s essays and books on the photograph worry at the political ambiguity of meaning in an image. He taught us that photographs always need language, and require a narrative of some sort, to make sense.

He also took care to differentiate how our reaction to photographs of loved ones depends on our relationship to the person portrayed. In A Seventh Man , a collaborative book with Jean Mohr on Turkish migrant workers to Germany in the 1970s, he put it simply:

A photograph of a boy in the rain, a boy unknown to you or me. Seen in the darkroom when making the print or seen in this book when reading it, the image conjures up the vivid presence of the unknown boy. To his father it would define the boy’s absence.

Under the skin

Because he had been a painter, Berger was always a visual thinker and writer. In conversation with the novelist Michael Ondaatje he remarked that the capabilities of cinematographic editing had influenced his writing. He identified cinema’s ability to move from expansive vistas to close-up shots as that to which he most related and aspired.

Certainly Berger’s work is infused with a sensitivity to how long views – the narratives of history – come alive only with the addition of “close-up” stories of human relationships, that retell the narrative but from a different angle. For instance, writing about Frida Kahlo’s compulsion to paint on smooth skin-like surfaces, Berger suggested that it was Kahlo’s pain and disability (she had spina bifida and had gone through treatments following a bad road accident) that “made her aware of the skin of everything alive —- trees, fruit, water, birds, and naturally, other women and men”.

The character in Ondaatje’s novel, In the Skin of a Lion, to whom he gave the name Caravaggio, was partly inspired by Berger’s essay on the painter . In that essay, Berger wrote of a feeling of “complicity” with the Renaissance Italian artist Caravaggio, the “painter of life” who does not “depict the world for others: his vision is one that he shares with it”.

Berger’s writerly inclinations and sensitivities seem to echo something of the “overall intensity, the lack of proper distance” for which Caravaggio was so criticised – and which Berger so admired. This intensity was not a simple theatricality, nor a search for something truer to life, but a philosophical stance springing from his pursuit of equality. He gave us permission to dwell on those aspects of our research or our lives that capture us intensely, and to trust that sensitivity. His was an affirmative politics in this sense. It started with a trust in one’s intuitions, along with the imperative to open these up to explore ourselves as situated within wider social and historical processes.

Reflecting on his written work, Berger wrote in the recent Penguin collection Confabulations :

What has prompted me to write over the years is the hunch that something needs to be told and that, if I don’t try to tell it, it risks not being told.

He knew very well that writing has its limitations. By itself, writing cannot rebalance the inequities of the present or establish new ways of seeing. Yet he wrote with hope. He showed us in his work and – by example – other possibilities for living a life that was committed to criticising inequality, while celebrating the beauty in the world, giving attention to its colour, rhythm and joyous surprises. We remain endowed and indebted to him.

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Thoughts on Essay 1:

John Berger emphasizes the importance of vision when he states “it is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it” (7). In the past when science was not dominant, “seeing was believing”. Even today, this concept holds some validity in that “the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe in” (8).  Berger is able to distinguish vision into two components. He characterizes ‘seeing’ as an involuntary process where one detects a stimulus while ‘looking’ is a voluntary process where one chooses what to see.  Vision is a unique process that is “continually active, continually moving, continually holding… constituting what is present to us as we are” (9).

Images are ways of ‘seeing’ and looking’ and can be captured by painting, photography, and other media.  These mediums are all unique and represent one form of sight which is shaped by one’s previous experience and preconceptions. The image-maker contributes to the record because the image is a representation of the maker’s interpretation of the subject.  It is this directness of images that makes them “more precise and richer than literature” (10). Berger’s use of image-only essays serves to challenge us to compare and contrast these images. By doing so, we are able to examine them critically. The image-text essays give context to the images and allow us to analyze them in a new light.

There is a processes of how images came to be. “Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent” (10). When the images could outlast what it originally represented, images then evolved to show how people at a particular point in time viewed that image. The beginnings of this type of consciousness first began around the birth of the Renaissance.

There are different elements that constitute viewing some object. The experience viewing a landscape in front of you differs from viewing a landscape painting that was made in the 1905. When viewing the landscape painting made in 1905, you tend to place yourself in history – a different mindset than from viewing that same landscape in the present. One example of this is with the paintings of Hals as described by an art historian. The art historian says that those paintings “seduce” us into believing that we can know the personality traits and even the habits of the men and women portrayed.  Though there is great skill involved in portraying the people in his portraits, much of the seduction is not solely created by the painter; it is inherent in the mind of the viewers to accept the way Hal saw the people he was painting.

That goes for any painting/image. In and of itself, the painting/image that is viewed is of something of the past. Therefore when some painting is being viewed, there is this inherent disconnect of the viewer and that image as opposed to the experience of viewing something in the immediate. When a painting is created, it is made by a creator with some perspective. The viewer of that painting is suppose to also view that painting from within the eyes of the creator as opposed to viewing an immediate object in front of himself from his own perspective. Therefore, there is this one universal view when looking at a painting in the Renaissance. This is a type of perspective that is no longer dominant in the present day. “Today we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way” (16).

The paintings of the Renaissance embodied this type of perspective. The European art in that time period “centres everyone on the eye of the beholder. It is like a beam from a lighthouse – only instead of light traveling outwards, appearances travel in” (16). This type of perspective, however, changes with the advent of the camera and photography.  The camera “captured and isolated momentary appearances” and showed that the notion of time passing was inseparable from visual experience.  What one saw depended on his time and place; this shattered the convention of perspective: “No longer was it possible to imagine everything converging on the human eye as on the vanishing point of infinity” (18).  The camera lead to the reproduction of paintings as images and ultimately cheapened the meaning of the original painting.  Berger shows this through various examples and venues.

Paintings were originally integral parts of buildings  that contributed to their uniqueness, but Berger states that “[w]hen the camera reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image.”  As a result, the meaning changes: it fragments and multiplies as works of art are reproduced.  Berger provides the example of people viewing a painting through the television.  Since each family, or person, views the image in a different environment and since the painting now comes to the spectator, the meaning of paintings is altered.

Yet another issue with reproduction is that the emphasis now shifts from “what it is” to “what it says.”  The importance now lies in the fact that the painting is a reproduction of a rarity, not in the painting’s meaning .  According to Berger, this leads to a present-day “bogus religiosity” that is concerned only with the market values and owners.

Reproduction also lead to paintings becoming information in that they could be used and modified for people’s own purposes.  Berger shows that a cropped version of a painting can completely change the original painting’s meaning — “[r]eproduction isolates a detail of a painting from the whole. The detail is transformed.  An allegorical figure becomes a portrait of a girl.”  Films are another venue where reproduced images are used.  According to Berger, the film-maker uses these images to lead the spectator to the film-maker’s own argument.  Since the film, unlike a single painting, unfolds in time, a series of reproduced paintings in succession construct an argument “which becomes irreversible.”  Due to the fact that films unfold in time, the spectator cannot (as with original paintings) take their time to examine all elements of the paintings.

Words are also often added to reproduced paintings.  These words alter the meaning of the image.  Berger provides Van Gogh’s “Wheatfield With Crows” as an example.  When this image is presented without words, one might not think of death at all, but when it is later modified with the words “This is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before killing himself,” one would be more inclined to associate the seeming chaos in the image with Van Gogh’s death.

Berger claims that modern means of reproduction have thus fundamentally destroyed the authority of art.  This new language of images “confer a new kind of power”: publicity.

Thoughts on Essay 2:

Modern publicity images have many drawn many similarities to classic oil paintings.  Often, modern advertisements shamelessly steal images and devices from these oil paintings.  The inclusion of these classic images in advertisements is, at first glance, an attempt to draw attention to the ad by using a familiar image. However, John Berger argues that modern advertisements are trying to establish a more powerful connection to the reader, as opposed to one of just recognition.  According to Berger, modern advertisements try to appeal to the viewer’s knowledge of art, culture, and history by presenting the viewer with images and devices that are present in classic works of art. One of the reasons why advertisements tend to ‘quote’ works of art is due to the associations of art with affluence and wisdom (Berger 135).   These associations suggest that advertisements are directly aimed to exploit the desires and fantasies of consumers.  In addition to these appeals, sometimes certain devices, instead of entire works of art, are ‘quoted.’  These devices contain images familiar to consumers: serene mothers, luxurious materials, and the embraces of lovers (Berger 138).   Although the devices may not be specific to a work of art, they appeal to concepts that have become universal to humanity.  Thus, classic works of art have become more than just images in the minds of consumers—they have become a ‘visual language’ that the consumer is well versed in and an advertiser can summon at will (Berger 140).  This section of the reading can be summarized in one quote: “publicity is, in essence, nostalgic” (Berger 139).  Appeals to the consumer’s historical background are what drive advertising campaigns due to the certain connotations consumers place on historical and artistic images.

We’ve been talking an awful lot about propaganda lately, so why not try to see if we can make some kind of nice segue way from that into advertising? Such a connection may not be obvious at first. Propaganda, we think of Hitler! Nazis! Lies! The manipulation of the masses! Advertising is Pepsi! Nikes! Ipods! The manipulation of the masses – oh, hmm…

Propaganda and advertising can both be characterized as media-based expressions of political will working on people. Hitler, the British, the Soviet Communists – all worked to spread and control information in multiple formats in order to achieve political goals, to win people to their cause, to make them hate the enemy, to get them to go to war, etc. We call this propaganda. So what is advertising? Advertising – or, as Berger calls it, publicity – is the dissemination of information in varied media promoting something commercial. Like propaganda, it’s information that seeks to affect behavior – commercial behavior, in this case. But it’s no revelation that commercial concerns are never just that. Money is power, and politics is all about power. Who has the power in advertising? For Berger, the answer is clear: the advertiser. The people and companies who create advertising hold a kind of power over the masses by producing so much of the media and messages that we see, read, and hear every single day. And similar to propaganda, these messages are targeted to different groups. Different classes are promised different transformations: for the working classes, products cause “personal transformation”; for the middle class, social transformation arises from owning products (p.145). Berger sums up the ultimate aim of advertising: “The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life….It suggests that if he buys what it is offering, his life will become better” (p. 142). Advertising is designed to get people to want to spend money, to create desires that empty wallets – but not all wallets. “The only places relatively free of publicity,” Berger writes, “are the quarters of the very rich; their money is theirs to keep” (p. 142). Their money is, in fact, largely made up of what was once your money, and that is point of publicity: put simply, to keep money flowing from the poor consumer/workers to the rich producers/owners. Now, perhaps that’s an overly radical way to put it, but it can’t be denied that advertising’s goal is to maintain the economic status of those with the power to advertise and thus to help maintain the whole class structure. And that’s definitely a political motive. Advertising’s power goes beyond merely controlling the money of the people, however. As a ubiquitous visual and pictorial mode, often making use of art, advertising constitutes a major part of the massive deluge of reproduced images that – going back to the topic of the first essay – Berger claims is used by the elite classes to manipulate the culture of the masses and control their relation to art and history.

Advertising, or publicity, is used by the upper classes, the rich and powerful, to maintain class politics and to exercise control over the people below themselves, primarily through images. Use of media to influence and exert power over the masses for the furtherance of political goals – no, it’s not propaganda, it’s advertising!

Like any good cultural critic, Berger makes a great point in his essay about how “publicity” (for this purpose, I’ll use advertising and publicity interchangeably) works to advance consumer capitalism and class anxieties. Berger makes the argument that publicity turns every viewer into a “future buyer.”

What the viewer is buying isn’t the product the ad is selling (this is almost insignificant, what’s being advertised is a brand, not a product itself), but rather they’re buying into the idea of their future, better, self. As Berger says, “the purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his own life…It suggests that if he buys what it is offering, his life will become better.” This is very apparent in ads for luxury items, which often showcase celebrities in extremely glamorous settings, operating on the premise that if you spend thousands of dollars on a handbag, you will be magically transported to this glamorous paradise as well, almost turning into the celebrity. This Louis Vuitton ad, featuring tennis player  Andre Agassi promises the spectator love and even says “there’s no greater journey.” Of course, for this journey, you need a $4,000 bag.

View post on imgur.com

Not everyone can afford a Louis Vuitton bag and Berger brings up the fact that the publicity will change depending on the intended audience. He says that images aimed towards the “working-class” promises “transformation through function;” and for the middle class it promises “transformation of relationships through a general atmosphere created by an ensemble of products.” The above ad is a perfect example of one part of Berger’s theory: the Louis Vuitton bags are just an accessory, something the couple took on a vacation to see each other (maybe flying first class?) The background of the shot includes a laptop, digital camera, car keys, and a cell phone. What the ad is selling is Agassi embracing the woman on the bed: the fantasy that being rich and having money will lead to love and well-lit romantic life.

I have to disagree with a bit of what Berger is saying in this argument as I find that ads aimed towards working class people don’t always sell them transformation, but rather enforces their reality. The below print ad for Walmart which targets a traditionally low-paid demographic (nurses) and focuses solely on the cost-cutting benefits nurses can achieve by shopping there. There is no fantasy here, only practicality.

The worker stops being “powerless” (as Berger says) and is suddenly motivated to keep working. He is empowered, not by his own drive, but by his choice of beverage in the morning. As Berger mentions, “the choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant personal choice.” In that way, publicity continues to drive capitalism by making the viewer think they are doing something significant by buying, when in fact, they’re just losing money.

Blog post by:  David Huie, Lakshminarasimhan Muralidharan, Cat Callaghan, Maria Diaz, Justin Sun, and Vincent Arrogancia

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Book Summary Ways of Seeing , by John Berger

How does the way you see something affect what you see? Does the public really need museums and art critics to explain an artwork’s meaning to them? In Ways of Seeing , published in 1972, critic John Berger argues that throughout history, the way we see art has been manipulated by a privileged minority to preserve their social and economic dominance. The book challenges the idea that to understand and appreciate works of art, we need experts to “translate” them for us. Rather, Berger urges us to pull back the curtain and look at the images before us with our own eyes.

In this guide, we explore Berger’s premise that, throughout history, the dominant class has used art and art criticism to “mystify” the working class. Additionally, we add historical background on both the artwork Berger analyzes and the landscape in which Berger is writing, and compare Berger’s ideas to those of contemporary art and culture.

1-Page Summary 1-Page Book Summary of Ways of Seeing

In Ways of Seeing, published in 1972, art critic John Berger argues that throughout history, the way we see art has been manipulated by a privileged minority to preserve their social and economic dominance.

This text challenges the idea that to understand and appreciate works of art, we need experts to “translate” them for us. Rather, Berger urges us to pull back the curtain and look at the images before us with our own eyes.

Ways of Seeing is a collection of seven untitled essays, three of which are visual and contain no text. The essays can be read in any order, and while each essay focuses on a different topic, there are connecting themes of perspective (“ways of seeing”) and mystification.

In this guide, we’ve created a chapter for each of the five topics that Berger discusses in his book. Within each chapter, we present Berger’s analysis of how the topic is currently approached by art critics and the public, if and how mystification is present, and how he believes we should shift our thinking (in other words, our “way of seeing”). We examine Berger’s arguments, add historical background on both the artwork Berger analyzes and the landscape in which Berger is writing, and compare Berger’s ideas to those of contemporary art and culture.

What Is an Image?

An object, living being, or landscape that exists before your eyes in real life is a sight. The couch you are about to sit on, the floor beneath your feet, and the flowers you see in the garden outside your window—these are all sights. An image is a sight that has been reproduced or recreated. The sight becomes an image when it is separated from the place and time in which it truly exists (or existed). A painting, a video, even a photograph—these are images.

Berger says that once a sight becomes an image, it’s no longer an exact record of what was. The act of reproducing a sight inherently adds a subjective value to the image. Rather than being a historical record of the sight, it’s now a record of how someone saw the sight…and how you are seeing the image now.

(Shortform note: When an image is continuously reproduced, you might imagine the meaning being skewed each time—similar to the childhood game of Telephone. With each iteration, a nuance is added or a distortion takes place.)

Our Experiences and Beliefs Influence What We See

Berger argues that our beliefs, experiences, and knowledge strongly influence what we see. Imagine three people are looking at the same image of an iceberg. The person who is concerned with climate change will instantly assign a symbolic meaning and see a melting iceberg within a rapidly heating planet. The person who has been to Alaska will see a landscape that is familiar and majestic. The third person, a history buff, will see what caused the sinking of the Titanic. In each case, the belief, experience, or knowledge influences what the person sees.

(Shortform Note: One study found that the amount of context we receive influences how we interpret visual information. Particularly, when there is little to no context, we tend to fill in the blanks ourselves and think more critically. When given context, our brains naturally move toward it (also known as confirmation bias) and we’re less likely to diverge from the information given. This supports Berger’s argument that what we believe influences what we see.)

The Meaning of Mystification Berger uses the term mystification throughout Ways of Seeing , and though there are contextual clues as to the implications of the word, he speaks as if the reader is already familiar and provides only one line of definition: “Mystification is the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident.” Because this term is used so heavily in the text , we’ve added a breakdown of mystification, from its literal definition to the economic context in which it’s used: Dictionary definition of mystification : “an obscuring especially of capitalist or social dynamics (as by making them equivalent to natural laws) that is seen in Marxist thought as an impediment to critical consciousness.” In Marxism, mystification refers to the intentional deceiving of the majority working class (proletariat) by the minority upper/middle class (bourgeoisie) to preserve their wealth. Berger takes this framework of mystification and applies it to the way art is critiqued and owned—particularly the idea that throughout history, art historians and the wealthy elite have obscured ideologies hidden within the art. Though he doesn’t use the term in a strictly Marxist sense, there are clear parallels between the two and it can be inferred that Berger’s Marxist beliefs influenced his perception.

The European Tradition of Oil Painting

The primary topic Berger discusses in Ways of Seeing is the European tradition of oil painting, which he says occurred between the years 1500 and 1900. The technique of oil painting (mixing pigment with oils to create a medium) was around long before the Renaissance, but it became an art form during this period because, for the first time, there was a need to develop and perfect the technique. This need was primarily due to the subjects being depicted: food, pedigreed animals, expensive objects, land, and so on. Tempera and fresco paintings couldn’t produce the intense realism that oil painting could, so to depict these subjects in a way that essentially placed them in the room—the desired effect—oil painting was necessary.

Why Oil Paints Are the Best Medium for Realistic Paintings Tempera is an egg-based paint that produces muted colors and dries very quickly. Fresco painting is the process of using watercolor paints on wet plaster, which also dries quickly. In both of these mediums, the artist doesn’t have the luxury of taking...

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Ways of Seeing Summary Shortform Introduction

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger argues that throughout history, the way we see art has been manipulated by a privileged minority to preserve their social and economic dominance.

This text challenges the idea that to understand and appreciate works of art, we need experts to “translate” them for us. Rather, Berger urges us to pull back the curtain and look at the images before us with our own eyes. Using Marxist-feminist theory, Berger demonstrates how the elite mystifies art analysis, and by doing so, preserves the very capitalism that he is criticizing.

About the Author

John Berger (b. 1926, d. 2017) was a modern renaissance man: He was a painter, teacher, poet, Booker Prize winning novelist, essayist, screenwriter, playwright, journalist, and—most famously—art critic. He is best known for his BBC television series “Ways of Seeing” and its companion book: Ways of Seeing . Berger was born, raised, and educated in London, England, but spent the second half of his life in France, where he died at the age of 90.

Though never an official member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Berger kept close ties with the association and was a leading figure in the...

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Ways of Seeing Summary Chapter 1: How We See

Berger begins with an in-depth look at how we see, arguing that before we can analyze how we see art , we must first understand how we see images in general. The concepts in this section are the vocabulary and foundation for Berger’s overall thesis, so in addition to the basics of how we see, we’ve added an explanation of Marxist feminism and mystification.

Foundational to art analysis is the concept of what an image is. Berger makes a clear distinction between a sight and an image .

An object, living being, or landscape that exists before your eyes in real life is a sight. The couch you are about to sit on, the floor beneath your feet, and the flowers you see in the garden outside your window—these are all sights.

An image is a sight that has been reproduced or recreated. The sight becomes an image when it is separated from the place and time in which it truly exists (or existed). A painting, a video, even a photograph—these are images.

Berger says that once a sight becomes an image, it’s no longer an exact record of what was. The act of reproducing a sight inherently adds a subjective value to the image. Rather than being a historical...

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Shortform Exercise: Analyze an Image Using Your Beliefs, Knowledge, and Experience

Berger tells us that what we believe, know, and have experienced influences our interpretation of images. Analyze your own reaction to an image using these insights.

Ways of Seeing Summary Chapter 2: The European Tradition of Oil Painting

Every topic discussed in Ways of Seeing connects back to the European tradition of oil painting. Berger argues that understanding the dominant form of art from this period in Europe is key to understanding Western history and social order. Because so many paintings from this era are heralded as markers of artistic and cultural achievement in Western culture, he says it's crucial to understand the politics involved, and why they’ve been erased from (or mystified in) art history.

“The Tradition”

The primary topic Berger discusses in Ways of Seeing is the European tradition of oil painting, which he says occurred between the years 1500 and 1900. This is not a defined period of art history because there were several movements that occurred within it (Romanticism and Realism to name two), yet Berger recognized that this is a distinct period with overlapping norms, hence his classification of the medium and time period as a “tradition.”

While oil painting took off at the beginning of the Renaissance (around the year 1400), Berger argues that the artistic norms of this time period were not fully established until the beginning of the 16th century. The norms continued...

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Shortform Exercise: Breaking With the Tradition

Berger says that the vast majority of oil paintings from this time period fall into the norms of the tradition, but there are a minority that break the conventional rules and are exceptional. Test your eye and see if you can identify the paintings that agree or break with the tradition.

Ways of Seeing Summary Chapter 3: Nudity and Objectivity

Nude women were a prominent subject in European oil painting. Berger points out that in the same way oil paintings depicted wealth using images of land and objects, women were also seen as property to be flaunted.

Nudes , Berger says, are characterized by the objectification of the female “subject,” who through the assumed gaze of the male viewer is made into an object. Men who were wealthy or powerful enough to buy and commission oil paintings wanted nudes for the same reason they wanted oil paintings of valuable objects: to remind others and themselves that they were rich, powerful, and desirable .

Nude women in European oil paintings appear for the benefit and use of the assumed male viewer, who Berger calls the “ spectator-owner .” He calls them this because the man who owns the painting “owns” the nude woman, and (in his mind) he’s also the reason why the nude woman is there—to display herself for him, the spectator.

RECLINING BACCHANTE BY TRUTAT 1824-1848

Berger notes that the nude woman is often being viewed by two or more men: A male within the painting, and the spectator-owner....

Shortform Exercise: Determine if Naked Is Nude

Berger uses set criteria to distinguish nudes from nakedness. Try out this particular way of seeing by analyzing 20th-century portraits using his methodology.

Ways of Seeing Summary Chapter 4: The Impact of Reproduction

The invention of the camera (and therefore a means to reproduce images) forever changed how art was viewed, understood, and appreciated. Berger notes that for several hundred years, fine works of art were segregated from the working class, only to be enjoyed and understood by the wealthy elite. Now, for the first time in history, art could travel to the viewer, and the viewer could be anywhere in the world.

As one form of mystification lifted, room was made for a different sort—the intentional distortion of meaning through physical manipulation of the image. In this section, Berger lists all of the different ways someone can change the meaning of a work of art (intentionally or unintentionally) simply through the act of reproducing it.

Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction” Berger notes that his discussion in this section draws heavily on philosopher Walter Benjamin’s essay “ The Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction .” Benjamin argued that reproduction of art devalues what he calls its “aura,” or its special, noble, meaning-giving power, which is present in the original...

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Shortform Exercise: Manipulate Meaning Using Reproduction

In this chapter, we covered four ways that reproduction can be used to change the meaning of an image: removal from its original home, breaking the whole into parts, proximity to words, and proximity to another image. Test Berger’s theory by imagining how someone might manipulate an image.

Ways of Seeing Summary Chapter 5: Advertisements in the Modern Age

Advertisements (or publicity, as Berger says), are pervasive in the modern age, and made possible because of the power to reproduce images. Their presence in everyday life is so great that most of it surrounds us like a cloud of white noise—noticeable, but only if you pay attention.

Berger placed his essay on advertisements at the end of the book, and we mirror that choice in this guide. This chapter is a fitting end to Ways of Seeing , because advertisements serve as the nexus of all of the topics discussed in previous chapters : Their existence depends upon reproduction , they use the same style and traditions of the oil painting , they use nudity and displays of wealth to allure, and they distort our way of seeing through mystification. And what is their purpose? To keep the machines of capitalism moving. To keep the rich rich and the poor poor.

In this chapter, we’ll take a closer look at each of these connections in an attempt to demystify advertisements.

What Do Advertisements Promise?

Every advertisement you see offers a different product or service, but Berger explains that they all promise the same thing: An improved life. By...

Shortform Exercise: Observe How Ads Borrow From Paintings

Identify the connecting thread between a modern advertisement and the oil painting tradition.

Choose an advertisement near you that contains a strong image, ideally one that is static—on your phone, or in a print ad, for example. Give the advertisement a long look. Are you able to identify a connection to the oil painting tradition? What do the ad and the tradition have in common? How do they differ?

Table of Contents

John Berger at home in Quincy in the Haute-Savoie, France, in 2008. Photo by Franck Courtes/Agence VU

Ways of living

John berger’s ‘ways of seeing’ exploded a discipline. but his greatest legacy might be a quieter project of re-enchantment.

by Joshua Sperling   + BIO

At the start of the first TV episode of Ways of Seeing , John Berger takes a scalpel to Botticelli’s Venus and Mars . The opening beat of the programme is the audio of the incision – the blade’s rough abrasion on canvas – before the soundtrack settles into voiceover. ‘This is the first of four programmes,’ Berger says, ‘in which I want to question some of the assumptions usually made about the tradition of European painting. That tradition which was born about 1400, died about 1900.’

Ways of Seeing first aired on Sunday evenings on BBC2 at the start of 1972. It attracted few initial viewers but, through rebroadcasts and word of mouth, the show gathered steam. By the end of 1972, it had gone viral. People in London and New York argued about Berger’s ideas. When Penguin commissioned a paperback adaptation, the first two print runs sold out in months. Regularly assigned in art schools and introductory art history courses, Berger’s project has never really waned in popularity. That first episode now has close to 1.4 million views on YouTube, and the paperback regularly sits atop Amazon’s Media Studies bestseller list.

For decades, Berger’s name has been shorthand for the series, which has been shorthand for a certain style of combative, materialist art criticism. Often presented as a riposte to Sir Kenneth Clark’s TV series Civilisation (1969) – Berger himself spoke of it as a ‘partial, polemical reply’ – the show attacked Clark’s school of connoisseurship ‘with a razor’. Suave, moneyed, knighted at 35, Clark was the embodiment of the high-cultural mandarin: art existed for the pleasures it afforded those refined enough to feel them. Berger was a self-styled outsider: he had run away from boarding school as a teenager, and left England for France in his 30s. Art was best, he said, when it was born of struggle and inspired belief. At its worst, it was little more than a luxury good. The difference extended to the very mode of aesthetic response – appreciation or critique? This is the significance behind the act of vandalism that opens Ways of Seeing . Viewers soon learn that the painting Berger cut was a facsimile, but the metaphor of the scalpel is plain: to question is to dissect. It is to cut past the scrim of beauty, and reveal more fundamental anatomies: capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, mimetic desire.

It is a move that has only grown in ubiquity ever since. The feminist art historian Griselda Pollock remembers the ‘moment’ of Berger’s appearance – 1972 – as a kind of methodological primal scene: after the show, the humanities began to turn away from connoisseurship toward what Pollock has called the ‘analysis of power and the deconstruction of classed, raced, and gendered meanings’. Ways of Seeing became an urtext of critique, a work that captured young imaginations, and changed the way that people saw and understood the world. Close to 50 years on, Pollock’s description still applies to most of the work done by humanities scholars and, more and more, mainstream cultural journalism too. From the arts and culture pages of The Guardian or The New York Times to the latest hot takes on Twitter, what criticism has come to mean is what Berger pioneered. In an age of open media, the implications are vast. If the internet has made all of us critics, that means we are all now foot soldiers in a culture war: self-armed semioticians and practiced deconstructors of political signification.

As is the case with most viral content, nobody expected Ways of Seeing to travel so widely, least of all its authors. Kept to a tight budget, the show was filmed in a rented electrical goods warehouse in Ealing, a west London suburb. Berger worked on his voiceover at his parents’ apartment on Hallam Street, in the imposing shadow of the BBC’s Broadcasting House. After the series aired, the arrangement of the book was anything but streamlined. Berger worked with his creative partners (Mike Dibb, Richard Hollis and Sven Blomberg) in a manner more closely resembling the bricolage of a zine than the strategic making of a bestseller. It was a principled if madcap route to fame, part of a broader revolutionary mood. Later that same year, on receiving the Booker Prize for his novel G. (1972) – a sexual bildungsroman set in prewar Europe – Berger announced on stage that he was sharing half the prize money with the London-based Black Panthers. Of course, fame can be secretly coveted only for the privilege to cast it off afterwards. But the one-two punch of Ways of Seeing and the Booker scandal were decisive. Taken together, they turned Berger into a star.

L ike beauty, provocation can hide as much as it reveals. Time brings new colour to old materials, and what makes Ways of Seeing so enduring might not be the same as what made it so electrically influential when it first appeared. We are now more aware of the fissures in the show, in its slight hesitations and indecisions, and in the hedges to what was otherwise such a freight train of an argument. The pictorial tradition of the female nude, Berger argues throughout the second episode, was not a celebration of humanist virtue but a fantasy of the acquisitive ‘male gaze’ (the term was coined a year later by Laura Mulvey). But then, as if in a footnote, he adds a hushed caveat, noting the ‘few exceptional nudes’ that were expressions of the painter’s love. There are similar equivocations at the end of nearly every episode. What of the masters of the tradition? What of its rebels? What of the mystery – beyond the ideology – of art? What of those anonymous works not held in any museum but exchanged between friends and partners? And what of the most modern art form of all – the art that comes to us on a screen?

In retrospect, Ways of Seeing was not only about painting but also television. More specifically, it was about painting-as-seen-on-television, which is to say it was about the transition from one medium to another, one tradition to another, maybe even one epoch to another. In short, it was about the severing of roots. Just after Berger cuts out the head of Venus from the Botticelli, we see her cropped portrait run through an industrial printer, multiplied ad infinitum and set in motion along the circuits of mass exchange. The movement finds its outward echo in the following shot: the silhouette of a television monitor against a blue screen.

From the oil painting to the printing press to the cathode-ray tube of TV: beyond the simple aggression of a razor, the opening of Ways of Seeing presents a filmic reenactment of the argument of Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936). (One of the chief legacies of the show was helping to launch Benjamin to the front of the critical canon.) Writing during the terrifying onrush of fascism, Benjamin saw the crisis of European liberalism as, in part, a result of the emergence of new media. The advent of photography, the phonograph and other machines of automated replication had produced a more disturbing change in social consciousness than others had recognised. The CliffsNotes version of the essay focuses on Benjamin’s notion of the aura , the idea that reproduction severs artworks from their anchors in space and time, that facsimiles lack something that originals possess. But this was only half of his argument. Benjamin was just as interested in the entire network of mass mediation (as a replacement of art) and the new, seemingly unanchored artform of film. These, he believed, were part of a broader shift that meant nothing less than ‘the shattering of tradition’ and the ‘liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage’. As new forms of technological culture replaced the old – and the argument will be familiar to anyone who has paid attention in the past several years to discussion of the internet – civilisation moved into a halfway house of mediation, susceptible to new modes of political adventurism and mass behaviour.

Benjamin’s essential concept of remediation has come to denote the process by which an older medium is represented in, or mimicked by, a newer one (as well as the inverse). The yellow sticky notes on your laptop or the painting app on your phone are common examples. Ways of Seeing was itself one of the most ambitious, self-reflexive projects of remediation of the entire postwar period. Building on André Malraux’s concept of a ‘museum without walls’, Berger built a museum of the airwaves. He presented at an often dizzying pace: Botticelli, Leonardo, van Eyck, Bruegel, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Caravaggio, Goya, Hals (all in the first episode). Berger was bringing painting into what Raymond Williams called ‘an irresponsible flow of images’ characteristic of television. It was an early harbinger of the waterfall scroll of Instagram or Google Images.

Remediation has been theorised by contemporary scholars in relation to adaptation, translation, perspective, realism, transparency, sampling, recyclage and the user interface. For Berger, it was always connected to something more fundamentally human: the experience of migration. What does it mean to be uprooted, removed from an original source, and placed into new surroundings? And what does such an otherwise intimate experience reveal of the creative-destructive engines of modernity?

Berger’s best essays convey a miraculous gratitude that the world comes into view at all

At the start of the 20th century, a number of Central European critics raised these questions with special force. From the Leftist philosopher Georg Lukács (who spoke of the modern era as one of ‘transcendental homelessness’) and his friends Béla Balázs and Karl Mannheim, to the Heidelberg circle around Max Weber, including Ernst Bloch, to Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and the other members of the Frankfurt School, the generation coming of age amid the crises of fin-de-siècle Europe excelled at feeling (and analysing) the disorienting, everyday effects of capitalist progress: alienation, solitude, fragmentation, a sense of spiritual orphaning. (The style also captured the imaginations of many on the Right, including Martin Heidegger and Mircea Eliade.)

Born a generation later, Berger became perhaps the most important critic to extend their intellectual project into the postwar English-speaking world, and then into the postmodern era of high globalisation. He worked within what might be called a ‘warm current’ of the European Left: an anticapitalist humanism less interested in structural analyses of exploitation (though Ways of Seeing had its dose of structuralism) than in ground-level questions of meaning and experience. In a modern world that Weber described as disenchanted, the qualitative virtues of traditional societies had been replaced by a ‘machine mentality’ whose metrics of self-advancement had to be expressed in numerical terms – money, productivity, efficiency. This was part of a larger desire to reduce all of nature to figures and formulae, eliminating the first-hand power of the senses: the visible and the audible, the palpable and the ineffable.

On a formal level, Berger was obsessed by the arts of sight: drawing, painting, photography, cinema. He often wrote about appearances directly, conjuring small physical presences as few others could: the way that a lizard shimmies as it moves, the warmth of grass in the sun, the ‘red of young eyelids shut tight’. His best essays convey a miraculous gratitude that the world comes into view at all. Berger was anything but pedantic. He was friends with academics, including famous ones, but his style was anathema to the learned and world-weary. The renowned literary critic Frank Kermode once wrote to Berger remembering a stay in his ‘peculiar paradise’ in the Vaucluse in southeastern France, so different from the ‘low morale’ and ‘vanity’ of Cambridge.

Ways of Seeing has had its impact on the discipline of art history – as both grenade and leveller – even as Berger remained uninterested in the kinds of questions that art historians tend to pose. He was drawn instead to far more religious themes: longing and exile, encounter and estrangement, leave-taking and return. His greatest legacy might lie in the unique ways in which he combined these two spheres – the visual and the existential – both of which have their roots in evolutionary biology. (Visual areas account for a large portion of the cortical surface of the human brain, while the prefrontal cortex deals in memory and those cognitive processes that help to found a coherent self.) Berger was one of the few modern writers to have trafficked so regularly between the world of ideas and the world of things. As he later reflected, it was perhaps his early work in television, with its voiceover and film track, that helped him to synthesise his love of both words and images, thinking and seeing.

‘The way in which human perception is organised,’ Benjamin wrote, ‘is conditioned not only by nature but by history.’ For Berger, the changes to visuality in the 20th century must be understood in relation to the qualitative dimensions of its historical watersheds. Close to 20 years after Ways of Seeing , he wrote of the advent of cinema in relation to the experience of exile. He saw cinema and exile as intertwined, part of an intimate dialogue between presence and absence. To film anything is to safeguard it for the future, and so to foresee its eventual loss. It is to watch a set of moments pass into a separate realm both inside and outside of time. ‘In the sky of cinema,’ Berger wrote, ‘people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.’ The century of film was also a century of transport, emigration, disappearance, uprooting. ‘Painting brings home,’ he concluded. ‘The cinema transports elsewhere.’

That distinction emerges as the heart of Ways of Seeing . As a film about painting, it was the hinge on which the programme was built: between locomotion and stillness, sound and silence, a blue screen and canvas. ‘With the invention of the camera everything changed,’ Berger tells us in the first episode. European painting once gathered the visible world into fixed scenes of static permanence. But film meant ‘we could see things that were not there in front of us’. Appearances entered a state of motion and flux. They began to travel across the world. ‘It was no longer so easy to think of appearances always travelling to a single centre.’

‘A single centre . ’ This might be another word for a home – that place, as the poet W H Auden put it in ‘Detective Story’ (1937), ‘where the three or four things/that happen to a man do happen’. For Berger, the need for a home was part of human nature, dating back thousands of years, at least to palaeolithic dwellings and the transition from nomadism to agriculture. In an essay first published as ‘A Home Is not a House’ (1983), curiously prompted by Steven Spielberg’s film ET (1982) and its global popularity, Berger considered more archetypal beginnings. The term ‘home’, he admits, has been long taken over by the moralising of conservatives and xenophobes, both representatives of the ruling class, who have worked to hide its more original meaning. He writes:

Originally home meant the centre of the world – not in a geographical but in an ontological sense … home was the place from which the world could be founded … Without a home at the centre of the real, one was not only shelterless, but also lost in non-being, in unreality. Without a home, everything was fragmentation.

Though expressed in straightforward prose, Berger’s essay slaloms through a conceptual minefield, one that has confused (and intimidated) most thinkers on the Left for at least a century. No other baby has been as perpetually thrown out with the bathwater of politics as has the concept of home – perhaps due to its presumed relation to the ‘national question’ or the desire for property. On each of these scores, Berger drew fundamental distinctions. Along with only a handful of postwar critics, most of whom were refugees, he wanted to acknowledge the atavistic pull that an original home can exert. To long for one is not incipient fascism, but a desire perverted by the ideologies of patriotism and patriarchy.

Though aware of the very real contradictions, Berger would have agreed with Edward Said, who wrote in ‘Reflections on Exile’ (1984) of the ‘unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and a true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.’ And yet he would have also agreed with Vilém Flusser, the Czech-Brazilian philosopher, who spoke of the migrant not only as a challenge to the native’s self-centredness but as holding the capacity to enlighten. Flusser, who (like Berger) wrote extensively on both photography and emigration, in ‘The Challenge of the Migrant’ (1985) suggested that the migrant should be seen as a ‘vanguard of the future’, an emissary of a new mystery: not the old mystery of a lost homeland but rather ‘the mystery of living together with others’.

The two groups for whom Berger came to advocate, the Zapatistas and the Palestinians, were both stateless

In Berger’s work, the figure of the foreigner represents promise more than threat. This was true in his first novel, A Painter of Our Time (1958), about a Hungarian émigré in London. It was also true for A Seventh Man (1976), his collaborative account of migrant workers in Europe, and his trilogy of peasant fiction, Into Their Labours (1991). In Flusser’s words, the migrant can be ‘both a window through which those who have been left behind may see the world and the mirror in which they may see themselves, even if in distortion’. Much critical thought has examined those distortions. Said reframes the question, asking how we might ‘surmount the loneliness of exile without falling into the encompassing and thumping language of national pride, collective sentiments, group passions?’ At a political moment that has seen the stunning rise of Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán – the list goes on – this might be the million-dollar question of our time.

Unlike other social theorists, Berger never tried to reason his way through the contradictions of nation-state or the citizen/non-citizen distinction. He preferred instead to disown any affinity at all with state power. The two groups for whom he came to advocate, the Zapatistas and the Palestinians, were both stateless. Perhaps this was a cop-out – but maybe not. In an otherwise sympathetic review of Berger’s From A to X (2008), Ursula K Le Guin pointed to the absence of political complexity in the novel: the allegorical universalism of its revolutionary lovers effectively ‘exonerated [their people] from bigotry and political folly or factionalism’. The charge of sentimentalism was often levelled against his later work.

In 2007, aged 81, Berger published Hold Everything Dear , about the War on Terror and the global migration crisis. In a phone interview with an Australian radio host, he was asked to directly confront the contradiction that immigrants can put pressure on the native poor, making them ‘nervous and even angry’. Berger drew back. ‘I don’t deny the difficulties,’ he said, but he added that the problems were often distorted by the vested interests of the national press, and by cynicism:

You ask me as though I can find a solution. No, I can’t find a solution in theory like that, of course not. The solutions … we’re not really talking about solutions, we’re talking about finding a way to live, to survive, to perhaps discover forms of mutual aid … All that can only happen in practice, in particular situations in the way that people associate or don’t associate in terms of some small project or in defence of some small thing which is in the area where they live. It’s not for somebody talking on the radio abstractly about the world who will find that kind of solution.

The answer reflected Berger’s distrust of theoretical remedies to human problems. Perhaps even more so, it accorded with his respect for practice and social knowledge. He never tried to gain the ear of power. He was more concerned with everyday gestures and decisions: the choices people either make or fail to make in their own lives.

A choice about a way to live presented itself to Berger shortly after he made Ways of Seeing . He was in his late 40s and had achieved an international level of fame. The invitations started coming in. He could have taken a position at a museum or university. He could have entered a world of sinecures and fellowships, residencies and agents, conferences and airports. He turned down almost all of this.

The reasons were historical as well as personal, and might relate, however indirectly, to our own contemporary impasse: our inability to see more than one generation into the future, the dissolving legitimacy of the metropolitan and academic elite, the seeming incapacity to move beyond a politics of negativity and despair. Just as we are hitting the limits of critique as a culture, Berger was hitting them as a writer – and a person. With Ways of Seeing (and his Booker-winning novel G. ), he had reached a tipping point that was also a midlife crisis and a fork in the road. ‘I can be only by destroying,’ Lionel Trilling once wrote of a certain modern attitude, ‘I can know myself only by what I shatter.’ But where is there to go when the demolition is complete?

There is a photograph of Berger from the 1973 Frankfurt Book Fair. Taken by Jean Mohr, a lifelong friend, it shows a middle-aged writer, exhausted and detached, lying on the floor as others walk past him in a blur. What was Berger thinking about? What was he longing for? It was at this fair that Berger met a young American, Beverly Bancroft, then an assistant at Penguin Books. Within a year, they were married. Two years later, they had a son. Soon they moved to a small farming village in the foothills of the Alps. The chalet they rented lacked central heating and running water. The outhouse was across the driveway.

The question, he once said, was of ‘continually learning to be embedded in life’

It would be easy to romanticise Berger’s third act as a rural storyteller. Even while haymaking, he was still a renowned writer with famous friends. But it would be just as easy to cynically write it off. Throughout the neoliberal era, most intellectuals have lived in a social world that is urban, cosmopolitan, cutthroat and status-oriented. Berger went someplace very different. He remained politically committed though his conception of the political shifted and enlarged, absorbing a broader sense of history and experience.

The question, he once said, was of ‘continually learning to be embedded in life’. During the 1970s and ’80s, as Ways of Seeing made the rounds in British and American classrooms, Berger was discovering his own need for roots – what Simone Weil called ‘the most important and least recognised need of the human soul’ – even if they were freely chosen and across the English Channel. Embeddedness, in this way, was about the double anchors of community and place. It required, on the one hand, the help of others – not primarily because of their material aid but because ‘they are real and therefore looking at them, being with them, you become real in that moment’ – but it also required an individual openness to the physicality of the world: the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun, the trees and animals and rain.

How this ontology would map onto urban experience is an open question that Berger never fully answered. How it would map onto digital experience is something we have yet to answer. Yet there is in his late work a kernel of something perhaps visionary. At a time when E M Forster’s humanist mantra – only connect – has come to sound like a slogan for an internet provider, Berger’s more numinous, earthly communions might be the most useful. Ways of Seeing remains the way he came to the attention of millions, and the hinge in his life. His long trajectory after the dividing line of Ways of Seeing still has much, maybe even more, to teach us.

In the conversation with the Australian interviewer, Berger felt compelled, if only for a moment, to leave the sphere of ideas. ‘Now I live here,’ he said of the village where he had settled:

I’m looking out of the window, the sky is grey, it’s got to be about 13 degrees … The hay is getting browner and browner, less and less nutritious, so there will be less and less milk this winter when the cows are fed hay because of the snow outside. So I’m sitting here in front of that window, and now, after all those years, I’m sitting at home …

What would Thucydides say?

In constantly reaching for past parallels to explain our peculiar times we miss the real lessons of the master historian

Mark Fisher

The environment

Emergency action

Could civil disobedience be morally obligatory in a society on a collision course with climate catastrophe?

Rupert Read

Return of the descendants

I migrated to my ancestral homeland in a search for identity. It proved to be a humbling experience in (un)belonging

Jessica Buchleitner

Metaphysics

The enchanted vision

Love is much more than a mere emotion or moral ideal. It imbues the world itself and we should learn to move with its power

Mark Vernon

What is ‘lived experience’?

The term is ubiquitous and double-edged. It is both a key source of authentic knowledge and a danger to true solidarity

Patrick J Casey

Thinkers and theories

Philosophy is an art

For Margaret Macdonald, philosophical theories are akin to stories, meant to enlarge certain aspects of human life

The Oxford Culture Review

"i have nothing to say, and i am saying it" – john cage, review: ‘ways of seeing’.

In January 2017, Britain lost the eminent intellectual John Berger , an individual peerless for his perceptive cultural contributions. Reading his revolutionary book Ways of Seeing , first published in 1972, I am still struck by its sharp modernist angles, the refreshing moral grit, and its sagacious study of our social psyche through visual culture. Berger is strikingly original, balancing academic gravitas with a delightful playfulness; we become enamoured with his rare way of seeing the world.

Berger fulfils the roles of a philosopher, listener, and somewhat of a magician as he makes tantalising worlds appear, and illusions vanish. Unravelling the title, he explains the difference between looking and seeing: our eyes naturally look, but seeing assumes an idea, an understanding of the subject. An artist’s subjectivity requires him to see the painting before he dabs pigment onto canvas, just as the observer sees a unique impression of a painting. Art is a symbiotic relationship in which both image and observer generate meaning. Film director Dziga Vertov once said, “I’m an eye. A Mechanical eye … the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you”. As Berger delves into distinctions between optics and perspectives, we see how our private conscience resembles mechanical eyes by selecting what our lens chooses to focus on and what to neglect. He emphasizes our duty to self-scrutinise throughout, asserting: “Our principal aim has been to start a process of questioning”. Berger helps us sharpen our critical mechanical eye – a skill that is becoming essential in a brave new world of image obsession and publicity.

The book is organised into seven essays, some pictorial and textual, others solely pictorial – an essay about Renaissance history is equally profound as Manet’s painting of a dead bullfighter juxtaposed with an image of swollen meat carcasses. His essay on post-Renaissance nudes is a triumphant marriage of humanity and scholarship. Berger writes with hyper-sensitivity about the power of the nude, applying its value to the present. Rather than severing ourselves from its primitiveness, nudity serves a revelatory purpose; raising our consciousness as sensual beings in the fragile filament of the body. Rembrandt’s exquisite ‘Danae’ captures Berger’s incisive approach; the soft light cascades onto Danae’s cream body, making us feel merciful towards not only the body of another but also our own. He asks, “What does this sight of the other mean to us, how does it, at that instant of total disclosure, affect our desire?” Such a question appeals to the architecture of nerves, organs, and sinews we all have in common – disarming the vulgarity associated with nudity. Instead of seeing the body as an object, Berger treats it as unveiling the whole individual person.

Berger’s kindness, however, also challenges – stretching our mind to think outside our personal periphery and into the imperative of universal justice. He reminds us that our faculty to value pieces like Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’ is a social gift. We have an appreciation for art because of socio-economic preconditions tilted in our favour. Berger presents data revealing the indisputable relationship between museum visitors and their level of education. This statistic has been enabled largely by art’s ideological function in European history as justifying power hierarchies; colonisers and aristocrats employed art as status symbols. Today there is the hierarchy of lucrative art businesses and underprivileged social classes to whom art seems inaccessible behind an academic-economic veneer. Berger feels the injustice of this theft passionately, stating that “such a justification can no longer make sense in modern terms”. In the past an artist was commissioned to paint those who paid to be remembered in history, but we no longer live in this economy. Furthermore, the possibilities of technology can facilitate the cultural osmosis needed to open art to a wider social stratum. Art reproduction and removing art from its original preserve raises other concerns, however, discussed at length by Jacob Pagano .

Ways of Seeing was originally controversial for condoning the affluent for inculcating a monetary attitude towards art. Berger explores how, from the commercial collectability of oil paintings during the Renaissance onwards, art developed a social currency; a visual representation of the luxuries one could afford. Berger writes in objection to this socio-economic gulf that capital has created and art permitted. Indeed, the monetisation of art is prevalent everywhere today in the media; recently Jay Z rapped his modernist “Picasso Baby” flaunting grandiose statements spangled with art references: “Leonardo Da Vinci flows/ Riccardo Tisci Givenchy clothes … House like the Louvre or the Tate Modern”. The thrust of Jay Z’s lyrics introduces the socio-economic climate art circulates in, where art now promotes extortionate materialism. It is in this arena where we must contend for art’s justice, authentic beauty, and its salient purpose: to support universal human flourishing.

For Berger, the success of his book might not be measured so much by the answers we produce to his questions but instead in the silence we inhabit to formulate the answer. In this space of meditative engagement with our unique perception, we participate in the art of seeing. The graceful spirit of the book makes Berger feel very close to us – his contributions are not just academically meritorious but enriching to life. Now each time I see, I am reminded of him.

Pratibha Rai

‘Ways of Seeing’ is published by Penguin Classics, RRP £8.99.

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Allen Cheng

Ways of seeing book summary, by john berger.

Want to learn the ideas in Ways Of Seeing better than ever? Read the world’s #1 book summary of Ways Of Seeing by John Berger here.

Read a brief 1-Page Summary or watch video summaries curated by our expert team. Note: this book guide is not affiliated with or endorsed by the publisher or author, and we always encourage you to purchase and read the full book.

Video Summaries of Ways Of Seeing

We’ve scoured the Internet for the very best videos on Ways Of Seeing, from high-quality videos summaries to interviews or commentary by John Berger.

1-Page Summary of Ways Of Seeing

John Berger opens his seminal text 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. One way to recreate our 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’s assumed that every image externalizes its creator’s way of seeing. Another way of phrasing this: all images are encoded with ideology regardless if their creators consciously want them to be. From this premise Berger explains how images have layers 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 powers that be. Throughout the first essay in the book Berger draws heavily on work by Walter Benjamin to explain how reproduction changes what images mean by circulating them in new ways and alongside new ideas breaking down rarified narratives handed down from elite which often seek stabilize our understanding meanings

In the second essay, all of the images are related. Text appears only occasionally to attribute paintings and photographs, and not every image is attributed. The theme of women appears in a variety of settings throughout history: there are photos from contemporary workplaces, oil paintings showing nude women, and advertisements for products sold by women. Berger does not explicitly connect these images; rather he leaves their relationship open-ended.

Chapter 3 explains the relationship between images of women and how they’re represented. Berger begins by observing that men are represented as active, whereas women are mostly concerned with self-presentation. He simplifies this by writing that “men act while women appear.” This is especially noticeable in European oil paintings, which often depict nude female figures. The nudity isn’t for a reason; rather it’s just to please the (presumably) male spectators who own these paintings. Women were typically depicted nude because it was thought to be vain or because beauty tools like mirrors were associated with them, but they weren’t usually behind the scenes making those decisions. Rather, their nudity was meant to please men who owned these paintings. Although there are more images now than ever before, some aspects of this representation still remain today: depicting women as passive objects for male pleasure while men enjoy diverse representations across media formats such as television and movies. It’s hypocritical that we presume males have subjectivity when denying females any individual agency at all in society.

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 than making a point about oil painting or photography, they appear to be saying something about wealth and excess.

Chapter 5 expands on Chapter 4 by explaining how oil paintings function in a market economy. The essay focuses on the European tradition of oil painting, which lasted from 1500 to 1900. Within this period, most paintings were commissioned for wealthy people who wanted to glorify their wealth and power through art. A few masters like Rembrandt could break away from this system by creating deeper meaning in their work than just showing off material possessions.

Chapter 6 is an excerpt taken from “The Art of Rhetoric” (1954) by Aristotle, one of the first texts to address rhetoric as a formal study that can be taught and learned. In it, he defines three kinds of persuasion—ethos (appeal to credibility), pathos (appeal to emotion), and logos (appeal to logic)—and argues that they are all necessary for successful communication; no single argument or appeal can persuade someone without incorporating at least some elements of each kind into its structure. He also explains why ethos is usually considered more important than either pathos or logos: because we have much less control over our emotions than over our reasoning skills, it’s easier for us to manipulate others’ emotions if we’re able rather than convince them with logical arguments if they’re not already inclined toward believing us anyway. This chapter concludes with several examples drawn from ancient Greek literature illustrating these principles in action.

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Postscript: John Berger, 1926-2017

By Ben Lerner

Last Monday, I learned of John Berger’s death, at the age of ninety, while walking with my daughter along a beach in Florida watching the sunset redden the water, and maybe that’s why the first work of his that flared up in my mind was his tiny essay on the painter J. M. W. Turner. I had not read it in twenty years. The essay was written in 1972, the same year Berger wrote his most famous book, “Ways of Seeing,” hosted a TV series of the same name, and won the Booker Prize for his novel “G.” “Turner and the Barber’s Shop” suggests a possible relation between Turner’s childhood experiences as the son of a barber, what he must have so often seen in the shop, and his innovations as a painter. Berger writes:

Consider some of his later paintings and imagine, in the backstreet shop, water, froth, steam, gleaming metal, clouded mirrors, white bowls or basins in which soapy liquid is agitated by the barber’s brush and detritus deposited. Consider the equivalence between his father’s razor and the palette knife which, despite criticisms and current usage, Turner insisted upon using so extensively. More profoundly—at the level of childish phantasmagoria—picture the always possible combination, suggested by a barber’s shop, of blood and water, water and blood.

Much of what I love about Berger is writ small here. How, with his signature mixture of profundity and common sense, he manages to link Turner’s personal and class history with his experimental artistic form. Berger is less making a verifiable argument (although I’m convinced) than he is asking us to participate in a thought experiment, to “imagine” the links between a painter many consider the father of abstraction and his own father’s concrete profession. Berger is telling us a story. A seascape and a washbasin—I start to see one in the other, the scales reversible. (Berger’s essay makes me think of that stanza of Dickinson’s: “The brain is deeper than the sea, / For, hold them, blue to blue, / The one the other will absorb, / As sponges, buckets do.”)

Skimming the obituaries, I see the emphasis is, predictably, on Berger as a “provocative” critic who unmasked the arrangements of power and property behind art and its discourses. He was provocative, thankfully, in this and other ways, his opposition to capitalism and the lies that sustain it unwavering, but, as the fragment of the piece on Turner illustrates, he was a materialist of a deeply sensual sort. The experience of looking at Turner’s canvases is enriched by the possible connections Berger suggests, not dominated or eclipsed by them. One tries on a new way of seeing. And, as Berger wrote elsewhere, “the relation between what we see and we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.”

All of Berger’s work—which includes poems, novels, drawings, paintings, and screenwriting—is to me a beautiful and bracing argument that political commitment requires maintaining a position of wonder. Sexual desire, the rhythms (or increasing arrhythmia) of the seasons, the mysterious gaze of an animal, the spark of camaraderie released by sharing a meal and story, the way certain art works transform an idiosyncratic way of seeing into a commons—such experiences promise us, albeit briefly, an alternative to a world in which money is the only measure of value. And, Berger’s work suggests, they aren’t forms of forgetfulness but of presentness, memory, recovery, because they place you in relation to, in community with, the dead. “The living sometimes experience timelessness, as revealed in sleep, ecstasy, instants of extreme danger, orgasm, and perhaps in the experience of dying itself,” he wrote in 1994. “During these instants the living imagination covers the entire field of experience and overruns the contours of the individual life or death. It touches the waiting imagination of the dead.” Whether Berger is looking with us at a film or a cave painting, he helps catalyze something like that contact, helps us feel the past as living, the past as the medium of the present. When he saw the cave paintings at Chauvet: “The freshness of the red is startling. As present and immediate as a smell, or as the colour of flowers on a June evening when the sun is going down.”

In December, 2013, I spent a few days with Berger in Quincy, the tiny village in the Alps where he had lived since 1973. I’d been invited by Colin MacCabe, who was making “The Seasons in Quincy,” a filmic portrait of Berger comprising four parts. In one of the parts, Berger says, “If I am a storyteller it’s because I listen.” I have often tried to describe the specific quality of Berger’s presence and I can never get it right. It is very difficult to describe how someone listens. Maybe part of it is that a silence surrounded him—the silence produced by the total absence of small talk, flattery, posturing, etc., which was amplified for me by having flown in from the cacophony of New York. Certainly his listening was a full-body act, a receptivity you could see in his posture, on his lined face, can even see in photographs, the mixture of proximity and distance in his gaze. In the course of our time together, he said many remarkable things, but more memorable than his eloquence was the kind of space his listening made for us, his visitors. A radical hospitality. His attention rinsed the language a little, helped us to mean.

A similar active silence surrounds his work. His shorter essays seem chiselled out of it. I see it in the way poems often appear as structuring devices within his novels, and I feel it in the white space of the poems themselves, just as it surrounds the lines of his drawings. In his collaborations with photographers and visual artists, one feels a companionable silence as the author and reader look at the images together across time. And now with his death those silences are deepening.

From “And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos”:

Each pine at dusk lodges the bird of its voice perpendicular and still the forest indifferent to history tearless as stone repeats in tremulous excitement the ancient story of the sun going down

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Ways of Seeing

John berger.

Based on the 1972 BBC series and comprised of 7 essays, 3 of which are entirely pictoral, Ways of Seeing is a seminal work which examines how we view art.

Why Look at Animals: John Berger on What Our Relationship with Our Fellow Beings Reveals About Us

By maria popova.

Hardly anyone has addressed this disquieting cultural tendency with more dimension than John Berger , best-known for his brilliant 1972 critique of consumer culture, Ways of Seeing . In his essay “Why Look at Animals?,” part of the altogether fantastic 1980 anthology About Looking ( public library ), Berger examines the evolution of our relationship with animals and how they went from muses for the very first human art, as cave men and women adorned their stone walls with drawings of animals painted with animal blood, to spiritual deities to captive entertainment.

He opens with a poetic reminder of how it all began:

To suppose that animals first entered the human imagination as meat or leather or horn is to project a 19th century attitude backwards across the millennia. Animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises. For example, the domestication of cattle did not begin as a simple prospect of milk and meat. Cattle had magical functions, sometimes oracular, sometimes sacrificial. And the choice of a given species as magical, tameable and alimentary was originally determined by the habits, proximity and “invitation” of the animal in question.

But there was also something else that drew us closer to our fellow beings as they went from our bonfires to our backyards to our beds — some other kind of singular comfort they offered. As any devoted pet-parent (to use a term rather telling in itself) can attest, a big part of what makes those bonds so intimate is the unconditional affection pets provide, a lack of conditions largely premised on their inability to speak, to talk back, in our human language, coupled with their capacity to speak directly to the soul. Berger writes:

With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species. Such an unspeaking companionship was felt to be so equal that often one finds the conviction that it was man who lacked the capacity to speak with animals — hence the stories and legends of exceptional beings, like Orpheus, who could talk with animals in their own language.

Berger adds:

What were the secrets of the animal’s likeness with, and unlikeness from man? The secrets whose existence man recognized as soon as he intercepted an animal’s look. In one sense the whole of anthropology, concerned with the passage from nature to culture, is an answer to that question.

The spiritual quality of that animal gaze, Berger reminds us, stretches much further back than the age of domestication — animals comprise eight of the twelve ancient signs of the zodiac, and the Greeks signified each of the twelve clock-hours of the day with an animal. But that representational capacity was also precisely what separated us from other animals:

What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.

Berger cites Aristotle’s History of Animals , considered the first scientific work on the subject, in which the legendary philosopher anthropomorphizes animals by suggesting that they carry traces of our “human qualities and attitudes,” such as “fierceness, mildness or cross-temper, courage or timidity, fear or confidence, high spirits or low cunning, and, with regard to intelligence, something akin to sagacity.” That anthropomorphism, rooted in our systematic use of the animal as a metaphor, continued up until the 19th century. Berger laments:

In the last two centuries, animals have gradually disappeared. Today we live without them. And in this new solitude, anthropomorphism makes us doubly uneasy.

Berger goes on to trace how animals went from caves to carts to cages. The Industrial Revolution gave us the internal combustion engine, which displaced draught animals from both streets and factories. But while this was undoubtedly an upgrade for both animal rights and human productivity, removing animals from our view was detrimental to our sense of shared everyday reality. Meanwhile, as urbanization and industrialization spread, the extinction of wildlife continued removing animals from that reality — more than that, it forcibly denied them the chance to share it with us and instead confined them to the artificial reality of the zoo. Berger draws an unsettling parallel:

This reduction of the animal, which has a theoretical as well as economic history, is part of the same process as that by which men have been reduced to isolated productive and consuming units. Indeed, during this period an approach to animals often prefigured an approach to man.

Alongside this cultural change emerged another significant shift — the rise of pets, which Virginia Woolf’s nephew argued were an extension of human fashion and vanity . Noting that at the time of his writing the United States was home to an estimated 40 million dogs, 40 million cats, 15 million cage birds and 10 million other pets, Berger contextualizes our compulsion for domestic animal companionship:

The practice of keeping animals regardless of their usefulness, the keeping, exactly, of pets (in the 16th century the word usually referred to a lamb raised by hand) is a modern innovation, and, on the social scale on which it exists today, is unique. It is part of that universal but personal withdrawal into the private small family unit, decorated or furnished with mementoes from the outside world, which is such a distinguishing feature of consumer societies. […] Equally important is the way the average owner regards his pet. (Children are, briefly, somewhat different.) The pet completes him, offering responses to aspects of his character which would otherwise remain unconfirmed. He can be to his pet what he is not to anybody or anything else. Furthermore, the pet can be conditioned to react as though it, too, recognizes this. The pet offers its owner a mirror to a part that is otherwise never reflected. But, since in this relationship the autonomy of both parties has been lost (the owner has become the-special-man-he-is-only-to-his-pet, and the animal has become dependent on its owner for every physical need), the parallelism of their separate lives has been destroyed.

But beneath this spiritual role of pets in completing the human self lies a darker dynamic, one in which the notion of caretaking becomes an imbalance of power. Berger writes:

In the accompanying ideology, animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are.

That dynamic was even more pronounced in the public zoo — a 19th-century innovation that came into existence as animals began to disappear from our daily lives. Emerging as an emblem of colonial power, where the capturing of animals became a trophy in the conquest of exotic lands, the zoo changed not only our relationship with animals, but also our very language. Berger cites the London Zoo Guide:

About 1867, a music hall artist called the Great Vance sang a song called Walking in the zoo is the OK thing to do , and the word ‘zoo’ came into everyday use. London Zoo also brought the word ‘Jumbo’ into the English language. Jumbo was an African elephant of mammoth size, who lived at the zoo between 1865 and 1882. Queen Victoria took an interest in him and eventually he ended his days as the star of the famous Barnum circus which travelled through America — his name living on to describe things of giant proportions.

Berger poignantly observes:

The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters. Modern zoos are an epitaph to a relationship which was as old as man.

But perhaps the most bittersweet reflection on the changing role of animals in our lives comes from the domain of children — the same observation that sparked Jon Mooallem’s ode to wildlife as he watched his little girl play with stuffed animals the real versions of which would be extinct by the time she grew up. Berger writes:

Children in the industrialized world are surrounded by animal imagery: toys, cartoons, pictures, decorations of every sort. No other source of imagery can begin to compete with that of animals. The apparently spontaneous interest that children have in animals might lead one to suppose that this has always been the case. Certainly some of the earliest toys (when toys were unknown to the vast majority of the population) were animal. Equally, children’s games, all over the world, include real or pretended animals. Yet it was not until the 19th century that reproductions of animals became a regular part of the decor of middle class childhoods — and then, in this century, with the advent of vast display and selling systems like Disney’s — of all childhoods.

(Perhaps MoMA curator Juliet Kinchin put it best in her design history of childhood , where she observed that “children help us to mediate between the ideal and the real” — and nowhere is the disconnect between the two more dramatic than in children’s animal toys.)

Returning to the zoo, where animals have become isolated from each other and deprived of interaction between species, where they have come to rely helplessly on their keepers for survival, Berger draws yet another chilling parallel between the animal experience and human culture:

All sites of enforced marginalization — ghettos, shanty towns, prisons, madhouses, concentration camps — have something in common with zoos. But it is both too easy and too evasive to use the zoo as a symbol. The zoo is a demonstration of the relations between man and animals; nothing else. The marginalization of animals is today being followed by the marginalization and disposal of the only class who, throughout history, has remained familiar with animals and maintained the wisdom which accompanies that familiarity: the middle and small peasant. The basis of this wisdom is an acceptance of the dualism at the very origin of the relation between man and animal. The rejection of this dualism is probably an important factor in opening the way to modern totalitarianism.

The zoo, then, fulfills Joanna Bourke’s admonition and by marginalizing and impoverishing the lives of animals, it does the same to our own. Berger concludes:

The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically. They have been immunized to encounter, because nothing can any more occupy a central place in their attention. Therein lies the ultimate consequence of their marginalization… This historic loss, to which zoos are a monument, is now irredeemable for the culture of capitalism.

About Looking is well worth a read in its entirety. Complement it with Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America , one of the best science books of 2013 , then revisit these favorite books about animals .

Thanks, Raghava

— Published April 1, 2014 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/04/01/why-look-at-animals-john-berger-about-looking/ —

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Ways of Seeing

By john berger, ways of seeing themes, coded images.

One of Berger's central points in Ways of Seeing is that images all contain more than what appears on the surface. Given that all images are man-made recreations of the way their creator saw the world, they are encoded with the creator's ideology. Throughout the text, Berger details the many ways in which images can be "unpacked" to reveal their underlying meaning: a family portrait in a beautiful garden can reinforce capitalist property relations, for example, or an advertisement featuring a nude woman can perpetuate gender inequality. When we "read" images, we look deeper into their meaning to understand how their formal qualities convey particular theoretical propositions.

(Anti)capitalism

Throughout the text—but especially in Chapter 5—Berger's writing is informed by Marxist thought. This is clear in his discussion of oil painting, which criticizes the medium for reducing all its subjects to commodities, glorifying private property. Here, Berger is implicitly making the anticapitalist proposition that art should be distinct from private property, or at the very least should not aspire to its glorification.

The Spectatorial Position

Another issue that Berger probes at length is the relationship between a viewer and the object of their sight. The act of looking at a painting is never one-sided or static, but rather, mutable and relational: different spectators will engage with the same painting differently. As a result, an artwork's meaning isn't located within the work itself, but rather, emerges as the spectator engages with it in their own personal way. As a result, the position of the spectator (both literal and ideological) is fundamental to the painting's meaning, which arises through their interpretation. How does the spectator "read" the symbols in the painting? Which formal characteristics do they choose to focus on? For example, Berger posits that the difference between a painting of a naked woman and a traditional "nude" is that the nude woman's nudity is constituted by and for the spectator—the painting is made so that the nude woman addresses the viewer in service of their fantasies. Even though the spectator is not literally part of the painting itself, their relationship to it is central to the meaning of the work.

Colonial Expansion

One theme that appears regularly in the oil paintings that Berger discusses is the expansion of European colonial power. Given that the tradition of oil painting he focuses on in Chapter 5 reached its peak between 1500 and 1900, colonial conquest features prominently into these paintings' subject matter. Some, like Holbein's The Ambassadors , explicitly picture tools for navigation and seafaring, glorifying colonial expansion as a noble and scientific mission. However, Berger critiques the worldview that underlies this colonial expansion, noting that the class responsible for colonization believed that the world existed to furnish their existence in it, a fundamentally narcissistic and exploitative state of mind. He also criticizes the relationship between the conqueror and the colonized people, noting that it gives rise to a self-perpetuating cycle in which the colonized individual is seen as sub-human. Here, Berger draws on the tradition of postcolonial theory that began to emerge in the 1960s thanks to philosophers such as Frantz Fanon.

Female Subjectivity

Throughout his discussion of the female nude, Berger evaluates whether the women represented in the paintings he discusses are represented fairly. As he states early in Chapter 3, the representational traditions that have dominated much of art history depict women as passive, surveying themselves and highly concerned with their appearances, whereas men are given greater agency and subjectivity. This is especially true in the case of the female nude, where the female subject's status as "nude," as opposed to simply "naked," is constituted by the presence of the (presumably male) spectator. The women in the paintings essentially watch themselves being looked at, positioning themselves as objects of the spectator's gaze, whereas men in comparable paintings appear to have other discernible traits, interests, qualities, and activities aside from presenting themselves to the spectator.

Spectatorship and Ownership

Berger emphasizes in Chapter 5 that, for most of the time that oil painting has existed, a painting's spectators were the people who owned it. Oil paintings especially were mainly on view for those who could afford to commission them. This helps explain why oil painting is so effective at displaying the desirability of property ownership: its historical purpose was to reinforce the value of the bourgeois classes' wealth, primarily circulating within elite milieux for most of history. It wasn't until the advent of mechanical reproduction that these images' viewership grew wider, which strengthens Berger's point from Chapter 1: reproducible images circulate more freely, meeting more viewers and thus opening themselves to a more diverse range of interpretations. Nowadays, in an era when images proliferate more widely than ever before, spectators—especially spectators of advertisements—are addressed as potential owners, as publicity images encourage us to imagine ourselves made happier by the acquisition of a new product. The relationship between spectatorship and ownership has effectively been reversed: while it used to be that only a select few already-rich viewers looked at the majority of images which served to uphold their wealth, now, everyone looks at images constantly, and these images seek to deplete our wealth in exchange for new commodities.

The "Deep" Oil Painting

Throughout Chapter 5, Berger describes a tradition in "average" oil painting which upholds the capitalist system of property relations by making it appear desirable to own more things. However, he contrasts this against a preferable trend that characterizes a far smaller proportion of oil paintings—the "masterful" turn, in which a select few talented artists can use the medium to depict something deeper or more existential than just simple property. One such artist is Rembrandt, who dutifully painted self-portraits throughout his life, eventually liberating himself from the traditional norms of oil painting and producing paintings with a heavier existential heft than the typical oil-painted portrait. Berger never outright states what this "question of existence" might mean, only faintly intimating that this is what sets the masterful oil paintings apart from the mediocre ones. We might infer that it has to do with the transcendence of material desire, the metaphysical intensity that the classical tradition of oil painting fails to fully capture.

Ways of Seeing Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Ways of Seeing is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Chapter 7. The spectator-buyer is also the: (P. 142)

Consumer-producer

Chapter 7. Publicity promises one? (p.132)

B. Happiness as judge from the outside by others

Chapter 7. Publicity is about the object we desire. (P. 132)

I think publicity wants to create desire where there was none to begin with.

Study Guide for Ways of Seeing

Ways of Seeing study guide contains a biography of John Berger, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Ways of Seeing
• Ways of Seeing Summary
• Ways of Seeing Video

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Understanding a Photograph by John Berger – review

T his new selection of more than 20 essays, edited by Geoff Dyer and including previously uncollected pieces, is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the power of this ubiquitous medium. Spanning some 40 years, they include pieces on the 1967 photograph of Che Guevara's corpse , on the meaning of photographs ("one learns to read photographs as one learns to read footprints or cardiograms"), on the shock effect of war images (they depoliticise the causes of war, accusing "nobody and everybody"), and a brilliant meditation on August Sander's portrait of three smartly dressed farmers in 1914 , in which Berger highlights the suit as a symbol of Gramsci' s cultural hegemony and of "sedentary power" – "the power of the administrator and conference table". There are also typically insightful pieces on Paul Strand ("he has an infallible eye for the quintessential"), W Eugene Smith , André Kertész and Henri Cartier-Bresson ("he photographed the apparently unseen"). As ever with Berger's writing, the theoretical is always informed by politics and a deeply felt humanity.

• Photography
• Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Craft and hobbies books
• Sport and leisure books
• John Berger

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Artist, visionary and writer - John Berger is undimmed at 90

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John Berger obituary

Cézanne: paint it black

John Berger: the dark side of Degas's ballet dancers

John Berger: ‘Writing is an off-shoot of something deeper’

A life in quotes: John Berger

Comments (…), most viewed.

Ways Of Seeing

67 pages • 2 hours read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Key Figures

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Chapter 4 Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 4 summary.

Chapter Four is composed of reproductions of both pre-Renaissance and Renaissance paintings. Most of the paintings are figurative, although a few of them are object studies. Many of them depict Christian subject matter or are explicitly religious iconography. Others are mythology paintings. Still others are aristocratic portraits, while others are depictions of dead bodies. All of the object studies depict food or animals. 

Chapter 4 Analysis

This chapter is most probably a primer for Chapter Five, designed to be both a visual prelude and a resource that is revisited after Chapter Five is fully understood. Many of the paintings can be easily used to prove the central arguments of Chapter Five—namely, Berger’s assertion that oil painting was obsessed with rendering monetized and propertized objects in order to flatter and affirm the ruling class’s position and legitimize the global growth of capitalism as both an economic and philosophical and moral system. 

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A New Pacific Arsenal to Counter China

With missiles, submarines and alliances, the Biden administration has built a presence in the region to rein in Beijing’s expansionist goals.

By John Ismay ,  Edward Wong and Pablo Robles April 26, 2024

U.S. officials have long seen their country as a Pacific power, with troops and arsenals at a handful of bases in the region since just after World War II.

U.S. military or partner bases

But the Biden administration says that is no longer good enough to foil what it sees as the greatest threat to the democratic island of Taiwan — a Chinese invasion that could succeed within days.

The United States is sending the most advanced Tomahawk cruise missiles to Japan and has established a new kind of Marine Corps regiment on Okinawa that is designed to fight from small islands and destroy ships at sea.

The Pentagon has gained access to multiple airfields and naval bases in the Philippines , lessening the need for aircraft carriers that could be targeted by China’s long-range missiles and submarines in a time of war.

The Australian government hosts U.S. Marines in the north of the country, and one of three sites in the east will soon be the new home for advanced American-made attack submarines. The United States also has a new security agreement with Papua New Guinea.

Potential submarine bases

Xi Jinping, China’s leader, and other officials in Beijing have watched the U.S. moves with alarm. They call it an encirclement of their nation and say the United States is trying to constrain its main economic and military rival.

Since the start of his administration, President Biden has undertaken a strategy to expand American military access to bases in allied nations across the Asia-Pacific region and to deploy a range of new weapons systems there. He has also said the U.S. military would defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion.

On Wednesday, Mr. Biden signed a $95 billion supplemental military aid and spending bill that Congress had just passed and that includes $8.1 billion to counter China in the region. And Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken traveled to Shanghai and Beijing this week for meetings with Mr. Xi and other officials in which he raised China’s military activity in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, calling it “destabilizing.”

Mr. Xi told Mr. Blinken on Friday that the United States should not play a “zero-sum game” or “create small blocs.” He said that “while each side can have its friends and partners, it should not target, oppose or harm the other,” according to an official Chinese summary of the meeting.

Earlier in April, the leaders of the Philippines and Japan met with Mr. Biden at the White House for the first such summit among the three countries. They announced enhanced defense cooperation, including naval training and exercises, planned jointly and with other partners. Last year, the Biden administration forged a new three-way defense pact with Japan and South Korea.

President Biden held a trilateral meeting earlier this month with the leaders of Japan and the Philippines at the White House.

Yuri Gripas for The New York Times

“In 2023, we drove the most transformative year for U.S. force posture in the Indo-Pacific region in a generation,” Ely S. Ratner, the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, said in a statement following an interview.

The main change, he said, is having American forces distributed in smaller, more mobile units across a wide arc of the region rather than being concentrated at large bases in northeast Asia. That is largely intended to counter China’s efforts to build up forces that can target aircraft carriers or U.S. military outposts on Okinawa or Guam.

These land forces, including a retrained and refitted U.S. Marine littoral regiment in Okinawa, will now have the ability to attack warships at sea.

For the first time, Japan’s military will receive up to 400 of their own Tomahawk cruise missiles — the newest versions of which can attack ships at sea as well as targets on land from over 1,150 miles away.

The Pentagon has also gained access rights for its troops at four additional bases in the Philippines that could eventually host U.S. warplanes and advanced mobile missile launchers, if Washington and Manila agree that offensive weaponry can be placed there.

The United States has bilateral mutual defense agreements with several allied nations in the region so that an attack on the assets of one nation could trigger a response from the other. Bolstering the U.S. troop presence on the soil of allied countries strengthens that notion of mutual defense.

In addition, the United States continues to send weapons and Green Beret trainers to Taiwan, a de facto independent island and the biggest flashpoint between the United States and China. Mr. Xi has said his nation must eventually take control of Taiwan, by force if necessary.

“We’ve deepened our alliances and partnerships abroad in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago,” Kurt Campbell, the new deputy secretary of state, told reporters last year, when he was the top Asia policy official in the White House.

What Deters China?

Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, said in an interview in Taipei that the strengthened alliances and evolving military force postures were critical to deterring China.

“We are very happy to see that many countries in this region are coming to the realization that they also have to be prepared for further expansions of the P.R.C.,” he said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.

To some Chinese military strategists, the U.S. efforts are aimed at keeping China’s naval forces behind the “first island chain” — islands close to mainland Asia that run from Okinawa in Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines.

U.S. military assets along these islands could prevent Chinese warships from getting into the open Pacific waters farther east if conflict were to break out.

Leaders in China’s People’s Liberation Army also talk of establishing military dominance of the “second island chain” — which is farther out in the Pacific and includes Guam, Palau and West Papua.

First Island Chain

Second Island Chain

philippines

But several conservative critics of the administration’s policies argue that the United States should be keeping major arms for its own use and that it is not producing new ships and weapons systems quickly enough to deter China, which is rapidly growing its military .

Some American commanders acknowledge the United States needs to speed up ship production but say the Pentagon’s warfighting abilities in the region still outmatch China’s — and can improve quickly with the right political and budget commitments in Washington.

“We have actually grown our combat capability here in the Pacific over the last years,” Adm. Samuel J. Paparo Jr., the incoming commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said in an interview. “But our trajectory is still not a trajectory that matches our adversary. Our adversaries are building more capability and they’re building more warships — per year — than we are.”

Mr. Paparo said new American warships were still more capable than the ones China is building, and the U.S. military’s “total weight of fires” continued to outmatch that of the People’s Liberation Army, for now.

Warplanes on the flight deck of U.S.S. Carl Vinson, an aircraft carrier, during a joint U.S. and Japanese military exercise in the Philippine Sea in January.

Richard A. Brooks/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty , a Cold War-era arms control agreement between Washington and Moscow, prohibited land-based cruise or ballistic missiles with ranges between 311 miles and 3,420 miles. But after the Trump administration withdrew from the pact, the United States was able to develop and field a large number of small, mobile launchers for previously banned missiles around Asia.

Even with the deployment of new systems, the United States would still rely on its legacy assets in the region in the event of war: its bases in Guam, Japan and South Korea, and the troops and arms there.

All of the senior U.S. officials interviewed for this story say war with China is neither desirable nor inevitable — a view expressed publicly by Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III. But they also insist that a military buildup and bolstering alliances, along with diplomatic talks with China, are important elements of deterring potential future aggression by Beijing.

Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, told Mr. Blinken on Friday in Beijing that “the negative factors in the relationship are still increasing and building, and the relationship is facing all kinds of disruptions.” He warned the United States “not to interfere in China’s internal affairs, not to hold China’s development back, and not to step on China’s red lines and on China’s sovereignty, security and development interests.”

U.S. military or

partner bases

The new deterrent effort is twofold for American forces: increasing patrolling activities at sea and the capabilities of its troop levels ashore.

To the former, the Pentagon has announced that U.S. Navy warships will participate in more drills with their Japanese counterparts in the western Ryukyu Islands near Taiwan and with Filipino ships in the South China Sea, where the Chinese coast guard has harassed ships and installations controlled by the Philippines .

A swarm of Chinese militia and Coast Guard vessels chased a Philippine Coast Guard ship in the South China Sea last year.

Jes Aznar for The New York Times

To the latter, Marine Corps and Army units already in the Pacific have recently fielded medium- and long-range missiles mated to small, mobile trucks that would have been prohibited under the former treaty.

These trucks can be quickly lifted by Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft or larger cargo planes to new locations, or they can simply drive away to evade a Chinese counterattack. A new flotilla of U.S. Army watercraft being sent to the region could also be used to reposition troops and launchers from island to island.

In an interview last year with The New York Times, Gen. David H. Berger, then the Marine Corps’ top general, said the service had begun analyzing strategic choke points between islands where Chinese forces were likely to transit throughout the Pacific. He said the service had identified sites where Marine assault forces like the new Okinawa-based littoral regiment could launch attacks on Beijing’s warships using these new weapons.

Philippines

Partner bases

The Pentagon announced in February last year a new military base-sharing agreement with Manila, giving U.S. forces access to four sites in the Philippines for use in humanitarian missions, adding to the five sites previously opened to the Pentagon in 2014. Most of them are air bases with runways long enough to host heavy cargo planes.

Plotting their locations on a map shows the sites’ strategic value should the United States be called upon to defend their oldest treaty ally in the region , if the Philippines eventually agrees to allow the U.S. military to put combat troops and mobile missile systems there.

One, on the northern tip of Luzon Island, would give missile-launching trucks the ability to attack Chinese ships across the strait separating Philippines from Taiwan, while another site about 700 miles to the southwest would allow the U.S. to strike bases that China has built in the Spratly Islands nearby.

In 2023, the United States committed $100 million for “infrastructure investments” at the nine bases, with more funds expected this year.

The Pentagon has forged closer military ties with Australia and Papua New Guinea , extending America’s bulwark against potential attempts by the Chinese military at establishing dominance along the “second island chain.”

The Obama administration moved a number of littoral combat ships to Singapore and deployed a rotating force of Marines to Darwin, on Australia’s north coast, giving the Pentagon more assets that could respond as needed in the region.

Last year, the Biden administration greatly elevated its commitment to Australia, which is one of America’s most important non-NATO allies.

The U.S.S. North Carolina, a Virginia-class submarine, docking in Perth, Australia last year.

Tony Mcdonough/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A new multibillion dollar agreement called AUKUS — for Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States — will permanently transfer some of the U.S. Navy’s newest Virginia-class attack subs to Canberra . The location of the new bases for those subs has not been announced, but the first group of Australian sailors who will crew them graduated from nuclear power training in America in January.

These stealthy submarines, which can fire torpedoes and Tomahawk missiles, will potentially add to the number of threats Beijing faces in case of a regional war.

Just north of Australia, an agreement in August gave U.S. forces more access to Papua New Guinea for humanitarian missions and committed American tax dollars to update military facilities there.

To Admiral Paparo, this growing network of partnerships and security agreements across thousands of miles of the Pacific is a direct result of what he calls China’s “revanchist, revisionist and expansionist agenda” in the region that has directly threatened its neighbors.

“I do believe that the U.S. and our allies and partners are playing a stronger hand and that we would prevail in any fight that arose in the Western Pacific,” the admiral said.

“It’s a hand that I would not trade with our would-be adversaries, and yet we’re also never satisfied with the strength of that hand and always looking to improve it.”

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Study Like a Boss

Peter Berger’s “Invitation to Sociology”

In Peter Berger’s “Invitation to Sociology”, the sociological perspective was introduced. Berger asserts that it is important to examine new or emotionally or morally challenging situations from a sociological perspective in order to gain a clearer understanding of their true meanings. This perspective requires a person to observe a situation through objective eyes. It is important to “look beyond” the stereotypical establishments of a society and focus on their true, hidden meanings .

Consideration of all the hidden meanings of social customs, norms, deviations and taboos, allow one to establish an objective image about the truth behind it. This method can also be applied to understanding people. This questioning, Berger says, is the root influence of social change and personal understanding of others. To do this well, it involves much intellectual prowess and ability to reason. This was an intriguing discussion of the sociological perspective because it discussed how ordinary people might go about debunking the truths of their societies.

Examples of researching newspapers, talking to authorities, and questioning preset customs and definitions, much in the way we can redefine the concept of “love”, makes sense when superimposed upon a living society like ours. Berger identified the methodological nature of the sociological perspective in that it is not a distinct way of seeing others, but a means to examine others through a multifaceted scope.

Although it can be difficult, this method is common and can be seen in people’s attempts to understand the significance behind various personal situations. For example, when speaking to a significant other one might realize tension in their voice. “What is the cause for this” They might ask. Without being able to debunk the truth behind their “other’s” behavior they might never be able to learn an accurate answer. This method of thinking objectively is indispensable to our attempts to become better able to interact and understand one another’s actions.

Ann Levine and Naomi Neft’s article “Women in Today’s World” asserts that although the status of females in developed countries has vastly improved with society’s movement toward a more gender-equal condition, the majority of women remain in a dire state of oppression. Women are more impoverished, illiterate, unemployed, and more destitute than men. In spite of some women’s improvements under developed countries’ more progressive, gender-equal regimes, education, literacy rates, employment, civil rights, health, and public representation remain substandard for most of the world’s females.

Levine and Neft begin their argument discussing the majority of women in today’s world. These women live in areas untouched by changing laws and movements toward gender equality. These are women who remain repressed by their own religions and social laws, customs, and societal traditions and are unable to gain access to better education, jobs, and healthcare. Still prevalent in today’s world are “tracking” techniques that aim young women in foreign schools toward traditional feminine jobs and ancient religious regimes (like those of Islam) that suppress women’s decisions how to dress, socialize, and earn money.

Statistics regarding education, literacy rates, employment, civil rights, health, and public representation demonstrate that although the situations of more affluent and westernized females might be improving, global standards still indicate women to be the secondary gender. Levine and Neft indicate that women tend to be the majority gender in countries where there is a higher incidence of gender-equal movement and better living conditions. Westernized countries across the globe are havens for women because they can expect to live longer, make more of their own money, and escape the oppressive male-dominated regimes of other countries.

As a result of women successes and the pride they realize in their achievements, movements that promote feminism and equality develop. With attention toward the welfare of women of oppressive nations, their education, their general living conditions, and largely, their suffrage rights, feminist groups attempt to “level the playing field” and promote the advancement of rights to all the world’s women. Levine and Neft presented a successful and powerful argument thanks to their statistical evidence.

It is true that many countries (i. e. e United States , Australia, and England) allow women to succeed and enjoy the same rights and privileges as men, but these women account for only a small fraction of the 2. 8 billion women living on earth. As this linear, factual argument showed, still 70% of all impoverished people are women. Further categories of statistics (one for each point I outlined) supply evidence accounting for women’s overwhelming role in the impoverished population. The authors furthered their point by noting an example of modern-day oppression of women.

The Taliban movement of Afghanistan employs strict Islam law that forces women to be uneducated, unskilled, and unopened to free, social interaction with others… especially men. This supplies final substantiation of the authors’ argument, that women continue to be oppressed by their male-dominated societies . It is a bold undertaking for women to ally and promote a world movement to abandon sexist traditions. Although I have never lived in a third world or non-Westernized country, I have studied the conditions women suffer as “inferior” to men.

In National Geographic and various courses I have taken, these terrible conditions are depicted in full color. Gender inequality is a terrible trait of our global society, and unfortunately, a trait that might not be ready to change. In America we see gender bias towards women in voters’ unwillingness to elect more females into high office, and while this is not nearly as severe as the rest of the world, it indicates the lingering practice of gender inequality.

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