Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series

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Author

John Berger, 1926-2017, English art critic, novelist, painter, and poet. Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb, and Richard Hollis, with Berger, made collectively.

Penguin Books, London, 1972. 166 pages. Designed by Richard Hollis.

The book followed a four-part BBC television series broadcast in January 1972, written and presented by Berger and produced by Michael Dibb. Each thirty-minute episode corresponds to one of the book's four written essays.

Description

Berger's subject is how European oil painting has been taught, reproduced, and used, and what that history does to the person looking. The argument is that seeing is not a neutral biological act. It is conditioned by what one has been taught to expect, and the conventions of art history obscure the economic and social relations the paintings themselves record.

The book alternates four written essays with three essays made entirely of images, no text at all. The visual essays are arguments, and Berger's decision to include them without commentary places the reading work on the viewer.

Reproduction. The opening essay takes up Walter Benjamin's argument about mechanical reproduction and pushes it further. Once a painting can be photographed, it stops being unique and starts travelling. It appears on a postcard, in a magazine, on a wall beside a family photograph, and each setting supplies a different meaning. The camera can also move within a painting, isolating a detail and severing it from the whole. Berger's conclusion is that the original painting's remaining claim is not its meaning but its market price, and that the language of authenticity that surrounds museum originals functions to protect that value.

The nude. The second essay draws a distinction between nakedness and the nude. To be naked is to be oneself without clothes. To be nude is to be seen as an object by others and not recognized as oneself. Berger argues that the European nude tradition is organized around a male spectator-owner who stands outside the frame, and that the woman in the painting is composed to be looked at by him. From this comes the formulation that men act and women appear, that men look at women, and that women watch themselves being looked at. Berger extends the point to how women are trained to survey their own conduct continuously, so that the surveyor and the surveyed occupy the same person.

Oil painting and property. The third essay argues that oil paint's particular capacity, its ability to render the texture, weight, and lustre of things, made it the ideal medium for depicting possessions. The genre exists to show what the patron owned: land, livestock, buildings, furnishings, and the patron's wife. Berger reads Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews as a painting about the field rather than the couple.

Publicity. The final essay treats advertising as the direct successor to the oil painting tradition. Both address a spectator who is invited to envy a way of life. The difference is temporal: the oil painting showed what the owner already had, while publicity shows what the viewer does not yet have and could acquire. Publicity, Berger argues, works by making the viewer dissatisfied with their present self and proposing the purchase as the route to a transformed one. It also functions politically, converting a desire for a different life into a desire for a different purchase.

Relevance

Berger treats images as things that do work, and asks who benefits from the work being done, which is the same question critical cartography asks of maps and interface criticism asks of screens.

The account of the internalized surveyor also anticipates a great deal of later work on self-presentation in networked environments. Berger describes a woman continuously monitoring how she appears, from a position outside herself, decades before that condition was distributed through a camera in every pocket and a public audience for every image.

The Hollis design is itself an argument about reading. Text and image share the page on equal terms, no image is subordinated to a caption, and the reader has to work out the relationship. This is the same problem an interface designer faces when deciding what a screen asserts through arrangement rather than through words.

Criticism

The book is polemical by design and does not pretend to comprehensiveness. Art historians have objected that its treatment of the oil painting tradition compresses four centuries into a single thesis about property, and that individual readings, particularly of Gainsborough, are made to carry more than the evidence supports. Berger acknowledges the selectivity in the introduction, framing the book as a set of questions rather than a survey.

The book has remained continuously in print since 1972 and is standard on introductory art and design curricula.

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