The Relevance of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing Nowadays

John Berger is a novelist, poet, art critic and painter. His essay “Ways of Seeing” is widely known by acclaimed artists and university students. When first published in 1972 after his BBC show -he shocked people with his perspective on viewing and understanding art; but is Ways of Seeing still useful and readable today? In my opinion yes, because he uses his platform to speak on injustices and civilization that were occurring at the time, he changes regulated ways of thinking, and most of his claims or ideas are still accurate and can be applied to human brains today. He does share his political views on capitalism and western society along with some Marxist ideology and even uses his platform to speak on inequalities and justice – when comparing two images of women multiple times in his book, he stated that women are looked at as objects, but continued on by pointing out hypocrisy within our world, “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her,” wrote Berger, “Put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting ‘Vanity,’ thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.” It was quite apparent in the text that he was a supporter and had sympathy for the women’s movement, by interviewing an all-woman cast and discussing issues such as empowerment.

 I do agree that Berger is a liberator of images – he makes me relook at images and paintings in many different ways that I hadn’t seen before; and it’s refreshing to see new things in an old artwork; but while he did please many people back in the 1970s with his perspective and interesting takes the authors general approach to the book is almost ostentatious because of his confident tone and general know it all statements… while that may be the case, I think he deals with art and images both quite well – he considers both and factors emotion, location, perspective, relationships, stories etc. One of Berger's points in ways of seeing is that images all contain more than what appears on the surface. He proves this though images in the text and makes us question every image we see. Throughout the text, Berger lists the ways in which images can be 'unpacked' to reveal their true meaning. 

My own understanding of art in relation to images is that images require some narrative and language, and our language with the camera radically changed our relationship with famous artworks, by severing the masters from their context and making them mass produced: “By making the work of art transmittable, the camera has multiplied its possible meanings and destroyed its unique original meaning.” This observation seems even more present in our culture, where everyone who has a phone is a photographer and digital pictures, making up not only social media, and digital maps, but advertising and surveillance too. Berger discusses how the goddesses of art became the models of advertising; Advertising tells us that buying a product will transform us by showing pictures of those who have already been transformed by it – these are people we should aspire to be like. An image of an underwear model is desired by men and envied by women. besides the truth to that fact, he is still a man and thus has no way of really knowing if anything he wrote is actually true as he is just another outside observer. Which could then again be interpreted as infantilizing, unnecessary and/or unwanted. 

The book is organized very thoughtfully, with images sprawled throughout and some whole chapters just containing images makes it very interesting to look at aesthetically. The argument builds from chapter to chapter by slowly introducing you into his own world – we begin with the basics, how to view art differently based on what we already know– and slowly progresses into more complex tangents involving habit, morality, sexism and injustices. A lot of the statements in this book can still be useable and applied to our own ways of thinking; such as reconsidering artworks, photography, advertising, mass produced media and way of life. The author uses images in his book to express his opinions and demonstrate different perspectives on artworks by playing with an artworks’ size, composition and narratives. His relationship with words in relation to images is excellent when providing narrative and backstory, or even forcing a few different narratives to change the emotion of the art. 

I thought this book was full of very interesting information but is presented in a dry tone which made it a difficult read. Upon finishing though I came out learning more on how to view material objects, advertising and all forms of art. It made me want to look at everything in my room over again. I think readers would get the same out of it. Its notable strengths are the images provided to prove his points, his ideas on mass media, and his vocabulary. His weaknesses are definitely the way his sentences are put together and drone on, almost repeating things multiple times. 

To conclude, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is definitely something that should be read, as it speaks on injustices at the time, it truly changes perspectives, and his ideas are still accurate and can be used/applied today.