Name: Ways of Seeing
Rating: 4.09156976744186 (172 reviews)
ISBN: 9780563122449

John Berger

Ways of Seeing

“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.

Radicalized and watered me down with new insight, ways of seeing indeed. 

Sven Blomberg

Chris Fox

Michael Dibb

Richard Hollis

Examines the social implications and psychological impact of the images and conventions of modern and classical artists

Berger remains the goat, timeless writing and fun connections to make on every read. Love this dude.

Eli Alvah Huckabee

Personally, not as much revelatory as succintly putting into words some of my beliefs that have occurred to me over the years as somewhat scattered thoughts. Insane that this is now over 50 years old and is still so relevant to the way our society and art and imagery in it operate, that it could have well been freshly published yesterday.

personal library, bought from greenlight bookstore fort greene

Patricia K

"a woman can scarcely cry at her father's funeral without picturing herself cry" thanks mister burger 👍🏼

pranya

for someone with absolutely no knowledge of art this gave very interesting and thought provoking insight. 

Anna

Nelson Zagalo

This is a famous book on the arts, popularly praised since the 1970's. However its reading doesn't sustain the same value against the passage of time. During the past century, a lot of the art, and film, criticism tried the route of Marxism, influenced by the writings of Walter Benjamin and Louis Althusser, among others.
John Berger book maintains the properties of an eye opener, able to change the way you see after reading it, whenever your contact with art criticism is recent. Thus as an introduction to the reading of the value of pictures in society, not only art, it can seduce and enlarge the interest in arts for the beginners in the subject.
As a legacy, we should not forget the book was made after a television series. Because of that the capitalist approach, or way of seeing, of Renaissance art and Advertising is superficial and only reveals a first layer of the entire complexity behind each subject.

Lily

Ways of Seeing peels off the layers of difference between "seeing" and "looking" as it pertains to our perception of visual works of art. While looking is a natural phenomenon that happens through the interactions of our retinas with the outside world, seeing assumes an understanding, a context, a subject. Seeing, is an art in itself.

Berger might just be one of the first people who situates "seeing" in this complicated setting for a wide audience. In the seven chapters of this book, Berger uncovers the social and political context of art as it has evolved through the last couple of centuries, drawing fascinating conclusions regarding the monetary value of art, its relation to our dreams, desires, bodies and class. I suspect some parts of this book, depending on the chapter and corresponding essays, are not particularly revolutionary to readers who are already familiar with said essays. For example, anyone who has read the renowned The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Bejamin, will not find the corresponding chapter in Ways of Seeing striking. But for others, Berger provides a thought-provoking and sensitive route.

This is a wonderful book. The prose is both uncomplicated and compelling, beckoning the reader to keep reading. Berger has a gentle but keen style of writing and a sincere passion for art that radiates in-between the lines. There is a kindness, a caring, in his sensibility that I felt again and again as I read through, and yet, I can't fully describe what I mean by this. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested to understand what it means to "see" art, and I also recommend that you take advantage of the wonderful (perhaps also melancholic; read the book to understand what I mean by this) digital accessibility of the mentioned paintings and photographs to view them in a better quality while Berger discusses them.

John Berger's Ways of Seeing changed the way people think about painting and art criticism. This watershed work shows, through word and image, how what we see is always influenced by a whole hose of assumptions concerning that nature of beauty, truth, civilization, form, taste, class and gender. Exploring the layers of meaning within oil paintings, photographs and graphic art, Berger argues that when we see, we are not just looking - we are reading the language of images.

Tegan Anderson

I’m going to start off by saying that I’ve only read select chapters from this book (1, 3, 7, and a skim through the rest). I was recommended it by my Photography teacher as university interview preparation so it’s not the kind of book I would usually pick up.

I wasn’t a huge fan of this book (well, the parts I read of this book). Part of this is down to Berger’s style: it seems to make a point and then not explore or develop it in a way that is satisfying or interesting. Reading this book is a lot of digging through pretentiousness to find the good parts.

The ideas in the first chapter are the most interesting and the most well-argued of them all. I thought he had the beginnings of a point with the nudes and women being objectified. This is almost a foundation of all art and it isn’t shocking to learn that these images are mostly for the pleasure of men. But it is shocking that Berger spends a chapter preaching about the issues of nudes then includes a lot of them throughout the book, not just in the chapters discussing nudes, although they aren’t always central to what he’s discussing.

Honestly, I think this book is aimed at people who either already agree with all of Berger’s ideas, or people who are willing to discover and accept all of Berger’s ideas. Maybe I’m just not good at interpreting his way of seeing.

Frederik Van den Bril

Short but an absolute must-read. I will never look the same way at oil paintings, classic nudes, mythological renaissance or commercial advertisements again. "To be continued" by the reader it says at the end of the book. It really feels like it because this book changed the way I look at art or commercials forever. I'm trying to do this book justice by writing a longer review but my writing is inadequate anyway to do this grandiose book justice. Just read it!

Erifili G

I'm somewhere between 3.5 and 4 stars for this. 

Ways of Seeing by John Berger is a book about art and art criticism. It's made of seven essays, each treating different topics related to perception and image through art, where Berger explores the various layers of the visual world that is such a great and unavoidable part of our daily lives. He does that by using images and words, without dragging and staying on the same idea for too long, which makes the book really fast and easy to read. 

What I liked about Ways of Seeing was some specific essays, and how Berger treated some of the topics. He has a remarkable way of analysing complex subjects that go centuries back in very few words, which was impressive and very welcomed. An essay where I found myself agreeing with every word was essay 3, where Berger talks about the depiction of women in European art through the centuries, and more specifically the depiction of nude women. It was a mix of art, psychology and philosophy, more so than the other essays, and it showed the striking but absolutely not surprising or new chasm between the image of men and women in society, and so, inevitably, in art.

What I didn't like about Ways of Seeing was, well, also some specific essays. There were some essays, such as the last one, that made me skim or sleep or fall asleep while skimming. Because of the way this book is formed, I know I would be asking for too much if I expected to like all of the seven subjects treated. The last essay, for example, was all about publicity, which could have been interesting -and I'm sure it was for some people-, if it didn't analyse such superficial concepts. I didn't feel like it was teaching me anything, because yes, we all know that images in publicity are meant to pass messages like "if you buy this you become desirable, if you can't buy it you're not desirable". 

In other words, I know this book is always recommended to people who are into art, and since it's short and easy to read you don't have anything to lose by reading it; I'd mostly recommend it to people who are into visual studies in general, though, as they might benefit more from reading it.

Ways of Seeing

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