Ways of Seeing

by 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.

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past. The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.

(Men in seventeenth-century Holland wore their hats on the side of their heads in order to be thought of as adventurous and pleasure-loving.

Perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world. Everything converges on to the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity. The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God.

When the camera reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image. As a result its meaning changes. Or, more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings.

By contrast, a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her.

One might simplify this by saying: 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.

The second striking fact is that the woman is blamed and is punished by being made subservient to the man. In relation to the woman, the man becomes the agent of God.

The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical.

Men of state, of business, discussed under paintings like this. When one of them felt he had been outwitted, he looked up for consolation. What he saw reminded him that he was a man.

In the art-form of the European nude the painters and spectator-owners were usually men and the persons treated as objects, usually women. This unequal relationship is so deeply embedded in our culture that it still structures the consciousness of many women.

Art history has totally failed to come to terms with the problem of the relationship between the outstanding work and the average work of the European tradition.

Consequently the confusion remains on the walls of the galleries. Third-rate works surround an outstanding work without any recognition – let alone explanation – of what fundamentally differentiates them.

Publicity has in fact understood the tradition of the oil painting more thoroughly than most art historians.

Publicity is the culture of the consumer society. It propagates through images that society’s belief in itself.

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.

Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.

In his or her day-dreams the passive worker becomes the active consumer. The working self envies the consuming self.

For publicity all real events are exceptional and happen only to strangers. In the Bangla Desh photographs, the events were tragic and distant. But the contrast would have been no less stark if they had been events near at hand in Derry or Birmingham.

Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.