Ways of Seeing, John Berger

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

“We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves

“If we accept that we can see that hill over there, we propose that from that hill we can be seen. The
reciprocal nature of vision is more fundamental than that of spoken dialogue. And often dialogue is
an attempt to verbalize this – an attempt to explain how, either metaphorically or literally, ‘you see
things’.

“Every drawing or painting that used perspective proposed to the spectator that he was the unique
centre of the world. The camera – and more particularly the movie camera – demonstrated that
there was no centre.

“For the Impressionists the visible no longer presented itself to man in order to be seen. On the
contrary, the visible, in continual flux, became fugitive. For the Cubists the visible was no longer what
confronted the single eye, but the totality of possible views taken from points all round the object (or
person) being depicted.

“The uniqueness of every painting was once part of the uniqueness of the place where it resided

“Having seen this reproduction, one can go to the National Gallery to look at the original and there
discover what the reproduction lacks. Alternatively one can forget about the quality of the
reproduction and simply be reminded, when one sees the original, that it is a famous painting of
which somewhere one has already seen a reproduction. But in either case the uniqueness of the
original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction. It is no longer what its image shows that
strikes one as unique; its first meaning is no longer to be found in what it says, but in what it is.

“The National Gallery sells more reproductions of Leonardo’s cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St
Anne and St John the Baptist than any other picture in their collection. A few years ago it was known
only to scholars. It became famous because an American wanted to buy it for two and a half million
pounds. Now it hangs in a room by itself. The room is like a chapel. The drawing is behind bullet-
proof perspex. It has acquired a new kind of impressiveness. Not because of what it shows – not
because of the meaning of its image. It has become impressive, mysterious, because of its market
value.

“Adults and children sometimes have boards in their bedrooms or living-rooms on which they pin
pieces of paper: letters, snapshots, reproductions of paintings, newspaper cuttings, original drawings,
postcards. On each board all the images belong to the same language and all are more or less equal
with it, because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the
experience of the room’s inhabitant. Logically, these boards should replace museums.

“… the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man’s presence is
dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible his
presence is striking. If it is small or incredible, he is found to have little presence. The promised
power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual – but its object is always
exterior to the man. A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. His
presence may be fabricated, in the sense that he pretends to be capable of what he is not. But the
pretence is always towards a power which he exercises on others.
 By contrast, a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can
and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions,
clothes, chosen surroundings, taste – indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute
to her presence. Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an
almost physical emanation, a kind of heat or smell or aura.

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image
of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she
can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been
taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.

“Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by
another”

“… men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to
themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself
into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

“When the tradition of painting became more secular, other themes also offered the opportunity of
painting nudes. But in them all there remains the implication that the subject (a woman) is aware of
being seen by a spectator.

“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and
you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had
depicted for your own pleasure

“To be naked is to be oneself.

To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body
has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates the use
of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.
To be naked is to be without disguise.
To be on display is to have the surface of one’s own skin, the hairs of one’s own body, turned
into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded. The nude is condemned to never
being naked. Nudity is a form of dress

“Women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own

“The loss of mystery occurs simultaneously with the offering of the means for creating a shared
mystery”

“Oil painting as an art form was not born until there was a need to develop and perfect this
technique.

“…the contradiction which makes the average religious painting of the [oil painting] tradition appear
hypocritical. The claim of the theme is made empty by the way the subject is painted. The paint
cannot free itself of its original propensity to procure the tangible for the immediate pleasure of the
owner.

“These relations between conqueror and colonized tended to be self-perpetuating. The sight of the
other confirmed each in his inhuman estimate of himself. The way in which each sees the other
confirms his own view of himself.
“Until very recently – and in certain milieu even today – a certain moral value was ascribed to the
study of the classics. This was because the classic texts, whatever their intrinsic worth, supplied the
higher strata of the ruling class with a system of references for the forms of their own idealized
behaviour. As well as poetry, logic, and philosophy, the classics offered a system of etiquette. They
offered examples of how the heightened moments of life – to be found in heroic actions, the
dignified exercise of power, passion, courageous death, the noble pursuit of pleasure – should be
lived, or, at least, should be seen as lived.

“Before these canvases the spectator-owner hoped to see the classic face of his own passion or grief
or generosity. The idealized appearances he found in the painting were an aid, a support, to his own
view of himself. In those appearances he found the guise of his own (or his wife’s or his daughers’)
nobility

“The so-called ‘genre’ picture – the picture of ‘low life’ – was thought of as the opposite of
mythological picture. It was vulgar instead of noble. The purpose of the ‘genre’ picture was to prove
– either positively or negatively – that virtue in this world was rewarded by social and financial
success. […] the faculty of oil paint to create the illusion of substantiality lent plausibility to a
sentimental lie: namely that it was the honest and hard-working who prospered, and that the good-
for-nothings deservedly had nothing

“Pictures of the poor inside the house, however, are reassuring. Here the painted poor smile as they
offer what they have for sale. (They smile showing their teeth, which the rich in pictures never do.)
They smile at the better-off – to ingratiate themselves but also at the prospect of a sale or a job. Such
pictures assert two things: that the poor are happy, and that the better-off are a source of hope for
the world

“To be an exception a painter whose vision had been formed by the tradition, and who had probably
studied as an apprentice or student from the age of sixteen, needed to recognize this vision for what
it was, and then to separate it from the usage for which it had been developed. Single-handed he
had to contest the norms of the art that had formed him. He had to see himself as a painter in a way
that denied the seeing of a painter. This meant that he saw himself doing something that nobody
else could foresee.

“[publicity] proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something
more.
This more, it proposes, will make us in some way richer – even though we will be poorer by
having spent our money.
Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently
been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes
glamour. And publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour.

“Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer. It
offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The
image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-
be enviable? The envy of others. Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of
pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being
envied is glamour.

“Oil painting, before it was anything else, was a celebration of private property. As an art-form it
derived from the principle that you are what you have
“In the language of oil painting these vague historical or poetic or moral references are always
present. The fact that they are imprecise and ultimately meaningless is an advantage: they should
not be understandable, they should be merely reminiscent of cultural lessons half-learnt. Publicity
makes all history mythical, but to do so effectively it needs a visual language with historical
dimensions.

“The oil painting was addressed to those who made money out of the market. Publicity is addressed
to those who constitute the market, to the spectator-buyer who is also the consumer-producer from
whom profits are made twice over – as workers and then as buyer. The only places relatively free of
publicity are the quarters of the very rich; their money is theirs to keep.

“Publicity increasingly uses sexuality to sell any product or service. But this sexuality is never free in
itself; it is a symbol for something presumed to be larger than it; the good life in which you can buy
whatever you want. To be able to buy is the same thing as being sexually desirable.
“Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears
or drives) takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate for
all that is undemocratic within society. And it also masks what is happening in the rest of the world.