Fig 1. A vintage copy -- it was supposed to be sold for $4.95.
If I was pressed to name a single book that permanently changed the way I view the world, I would probably say Ways of Seeing by John Berger. It's by no means a new book, and I read it by chance while working on a history project titled "American Greed," which is odd in retrospect, as there is nothing particularly American about Ways of seeing. However, if you want a radically new perspective on the interaction between images and people's minds, you could do much worse. Also in its favour are that it is very short (a mere 166 pages) and has lots of pictures.
It didn't even start out as a stand-alone book, but as a companion to the BBC documentary series of the same name. If you have the patience, I would recommend hunting around Youtube for bootlegged versions of the show, although the second episode is hard to find because it has topless women in it. The three-part series is a little time-capsule of what BBC documentaries were like in the 1970s -- most of the footage is just Berger standing in front of a blue wall, talking directly to the camera, with interludes of oil paintings, interviews of schoolchildren, or publicity stills for alcohol. "Simple but impactful" about sums it up.
So far, What I've said may seem to indicate that Ways of Seeing is an interesting relic of 70s cultural criticism, but little else. After all, 52 years later, one could argue that the visual landscape of the average Western person has changed so dramatically that Berger's conclusions no longer apply.
However, the changes in visual culture which Berger was responding to are perpetuating themselves into the present day. Ways of Seeing was in part a response to the unprecedented spread, reproduction, and alteration of photographic images in Western societies. Berger himself took advantage of the young medium of colour television, while around him the daily lives of people were increasingly filled with glossy magazines, large-scale billboards, and colour films. The dominance of the image over the word which had started to take hold in this era has arguably become more pronounced now. The trends which he identified have not diminished with time, but have morphed with the advent of digital technology.
Take for instance, the first chapter of the book, which develops on Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." What Berger wanted to draw attention to is that images, particularly images of "fine" or "high" art, are vulnerable to change and manipulation, and their meaning changes accordingly. Essentially, there is no such thing as "just" a copy of a painting. In realising that frequent reproduction and dissemination in different formats could change the way in which we treat art, Berger spotted the way the new visual world was premised on the interaction between image and viewer (or should I say consumer?) What Berger did was to forecast, albeit at great temporal distance, the way image editing technologies left any work of art open to endless variation, reposting, and captioning, with each rendition tailored to specific tastes and audiences. What the printing of a Mona Lisa on a t-shirt foreshadowed was the transformation of all images, not into representations of the things they pictured, but into adaptable symbols for subgroups within society.
Fig. 2 If you want to appear really emphatic, why not write your entire book in bold font?
More sinisterly, he also observed the way that taking details out of context in an image makes them vulnerable to reinterpretation. His example was the Botticelli painting of a reclining Venus and Mars -- cut out Venus' face, and you are left with a thumbnail of a young woman, devoid of any religious, cultural, or artistic resonance. Berger selected his example to make a point about how editing and copying were "cheapening" the value of fine art, but the point about how edited images lose their intended meaning is a cautionary tale in the age of photoshop and AI-generated images.
If this sounds insightful but a bit dry, be reassured that it gets better the further you go on. The central third of "Ways of Seeing" is occupied by a discussion of what we commonly call today "the male gaze" or perhaps more generally "sexualised imagery." Actually, if you read John Berger's Wikipedia profile, it credits him with discovering the male gaze as an artistic phenomenon. I have to give the caveat that this is not strictly true. "Male gaze" was first used by Laura Mulvey to refer specifically to the cinematographic techniques used to capture female characters in Hollywood movies. What Berger isolates here is a less genre-specific and more diffuse attitude towards women in images.
What Berger noticed, in representations ranging from Rubens to an Almay lipstick ad, was that the standard image of a woman in Western art presumes a male viewer, and that the female subject of the painting is consistently presented in such a way as to ask for the male viewer's approval. With this comes a necessary curtailment of female agency: as Berger says "men act, and women appear."
This dictum has come under some criticism in recent years for its reductive approach to gender and power. Indeed, Berger may have been writing just slightly too early to encounter the ways in which the representation of masculinity was to evolve in the later 20th century. The net of objectification arguable spread only wider with time. Susan Bordo, for example, writing about the representation of men in advertising from the 1980s onwards, observes that the supine, vulnerable tendency visible in standard depictions of women in publicity expanded to include younger male figures. Rather than the gaze of domination receding within Western culture, it instead grew more universal.
Not only is the gaze no longer confined to one gender, it also seems to be increasingly turned by individuals on themselves. The situation for women which Berger described - "women watch themselves being looked at" - aptly describes the extreme self-scrutiny which the omnipresence of cameras and social media has triggered. We no longer need to imagine how we appear to other people -- the images which we post online or see reflected back to us via screens do that job for us. One no longer needs another person's presence to be objectified.
"Self-objectification," in which one sees oneself as the collection of features and attributes visible to other people, is an increasingly common mental default. Jonathan Haidt singled out the advent of the front-facing camera on the iPhone 4 in 2010 as triggering a massive upswing in this unhealthy form of self-awareness. The ability to see the two-dimensional image or video that others see meant that one's entire life became a performance of others. Arthur C. Brooks recently listed this kind of self-obsession as a major obstacle to happiness in the present day. Like the women Berger described who are forever condemned to feel uneasy in their own skin, the ability to objectify oneself accounts for much of the feeling of anxiety and disconnect in the digital era.
Another aspect of that anxiety and disconnect is the theme of the final third of the book. Berger turns his attention from the way in which images model gender dynamics to the way in which they model consumerist culture. What sets Berger apart from other critics of his era was his understanding that images project a lifestyle. Long before manufacturers relied on brand management or entrepreneurs openly admitted to "creating a narrative" for their product, he realised that images, both images created by individuals and images created by companies, project an alternate reality which is implicitly different from the viewer's. Yet the improvements in media quality (i.e. oil paint, colour photography) made the possession of the same objects and lifestyle seem tenable.
This collapsing of consumerist fantasy and reality has only become more extreme, and has drawn on many of the same technologies as self-objectification. The influencer industry, which functions on the premise that "real people endorse the products, thrives on people turning themselves into brands for mass observation and consumption. At the same time, the video format of many publicity materials today, via TikTok, Youtube, and Instagram stories, means that the narrative element reinforces the idea that the fantasy is real and that one really can have access to this lifestyle.
John Berger would probably not take kindly to all this promotional content displacing other media. As if working for the BBC wasn't a sign in itself, he was also a committed Marxist, and thought that the dehumanising working conditions caused by capitalism explained why the average person found publicity images so irresistible. While Marxism has fallen out of fashion these days, his recognition that publicity's power lies in its accessible escapism remains true. Influencing thrives by persuading us that the only thing separating us from the person we are watching is what we consume.
In short, Berger's work presaged the world of imagery we now inhabit, filled with images that may be altered, artworks that become symbols, and simulacra of real people reduced to objects. This all sounds rather bleak, but it's not the end of the story. The fact that Berger turned this project into a documentary for public television, and that he drew most of his examples from contemporary, prosaic images indicate that a critical approach to images is accessible to everyone. As the final page says...