John Berger

“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled” — so opens John Berger’s revolutionary million-copy bestseller on how to look at art

John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and the most influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: “This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures.” By now he has.

Ways of Seeing

anaïs-fiona

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

versus the Renaissance-era convention of “perspective”

Conor Murphy

The invention of the camera changed the way men saw. The visible came to mean something different to them. This was immediately reflected in painting. 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.

When the art of the past ceases to be viewed nostalgically, the works will cease to be holy relics

A woman must continually watch herself. / From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.

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

Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance.

Ways of Seeing quotes

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