The Mechanical Eye (Metaphor)
As he explains the visual conventions of perspective, Berger quotes Dziga Vertov, a revolutionary Soviet filmmaker:
"I'm an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it." (p. 17)
In Vertov's manifesto, he writes from the perspective of the camera, whose way of seeing differs from human vision, revealing the world more perfectly than the flawed, fallible eye. Berger doesn't include this quote to suggest that automated vision is preferable to human sight, but rather, employs it to illustrate how the camera fundamentally changed humans' experience of the visual by capturing isolated moments in time. Because of this newfound capacity, Renaissance perspective—where the entire visual world converges on the eye of the beholder—fell out of style, no longer adequately capturing a world that changes in time. Of course, neither Berger or Vertov is literally a camera—rather, they write or quote from its perspective to vividly illustrate how photography changed the field of human vision.
The Building's Memory (Metaphor)
Central to Chapter 1 is Berger's discussion of how mechanical reproducibility changes the meaning of an image. To illustrate this, he harkens back to a time when images could only be seen in the spaces for which they were designed, such as a painting on the wall of a Renaissance chapel. Describing the status of these paintings, Berger writes:
"The images on the wall are records of the building's interior life, that together they make up the building's memory." (p. 19)
Now, the building, being an inanimate object, does not have any actual memory. But this metaphor illustrates the fact that, prior to the advent of mechanical reproduction, images were linked to the spaces where they resided, and their fixed position in that space contributed to their rarity and power. This is how he rephrases Walter Benjamin's concept of the aura, or the "here-and-now" of an artwork: an unreproducible image derives its sense of uniqueness from the exact place and time where it exists, because, unlike a photocopy or an email, it cannot leave that place and time.
The Means of Reproduction (Metaphor)
As Berger expands Walter Benjamin's discussion of mechanical reproducibility, he offers the following metaphor:
"The means of reproduction are used politically and commercially to disguise or deny what their existence makes possible." (p. 30)
After Marx, he uses the idea of the "means of reproduction" to describe the general capacity for images to be recreated. Sure, there's no singular central copy machine that constitutes the literal "means" of reproducing images—the "means of reproduction" stands in for the complicated set of relations governing images' reproducibility. In this context, it basically means "the power to recreate images," which, as he points out, too often resides exclusively in the hands of the powerful.
The Split Woman (Metaphor)
Before he delves fully into his examination of female nudes in paintings, Berger examines the social status of women that persists in contemporary society:
"The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being split into two." (p. 46)
While the conditions of gender inequality are certainly stifling, they (usually) aren't literally so bad that women end up cut in half. Instead, what Berger means here is that women are forced to play a double role, surveying themselves constantly—in a sense, they are always accompanied by their own images of themselves, or the images of themselves that they believe they are projecting out into the world. To put it differently, a woman's consciousness is split between the part of herself that is surveyor and the part that is surveyed: her agency to act, and her awareness that she also appears. Berger notes that the same is not true of men, who simply survey others without surveying themselves, never feeling the same split-consciousness.
Display as Disguise (Metaphor)
A core argument that Berger makes in Chapter 3 is the distinction between "nude" and "naked": while nakedness is a natural state existing in the world, nudity is constituted by a certain relationship to a spectator: you can't be nude without being seen by others. To further explain this, he writes:
"To be on display is to have the surface of one's own skin, the hairs of one's own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded." (p. 54)
Although a naked person and a nude person may look exactly alike, a certain transformation takes place when the naked person becomes the object of a spectator's gaze. Berger vivifies this transformation by suggesting that it involves having one's own skin turned into a disguise, even though, in reality, the sense of being looked at doesn't cause any real physical change to take place. The change, as it is perceptible in these artworks, has more to do with how the nude subject is positioned in relation to the viewer: does their body face frontally outward, or appear contorted to better serve the spectator's visual pleasure? If so, it's likely a "nude," in the sense that the subject's own virtues or characteristics are suppressed in favor of their physical appearance, which caters to the gaze of the viewer. This explains how one's own body can be "turned into a disguise": the characteristics that would lend depth or identity to a painting are discarded in favor of a generic representation onto which the viewer's fantasies can be easily projected.
A House of Paintings (Simile)
Describing the social implications of the European tradition of oil painting between 1500 and 1900, Berger observes:
"It is as though the collector lives in a house built of paintings. What is their advantage over walls of stone or wood?" (p. 85)
In this simile, he likens paintings to the fundamental unit of private property: the house. While the wealthy art collector may not literally live in a house made of paintings, his collection of oil paintings serves a similar purpose to a luxurious home: it surrounds him, reminding him of his wealth by showing him sights of what he can (and, often, already does) possess. They serve to confirm the pride of the collector, upholding their wealth and propping up their positive self-evaluations. So, while they're not the literal walls within which the collector lives, paintings serve a metaphorically similar function in supporting their favorable views of themselves.
Advertisement: Thief of Satisfaction (Metaphor)
In Chapter 7, as Berger discusses how "publicity images" (advertisements) psychologically address their viewers, he explains:
"The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product." (p. 134)
Being an inanimate object, an advertisement cannot literally steal anything from its viewer—but this metaphor illustrates how an ad can, in an instant, make us feel dissatisfied with ourselves because we lack a product we didn't even know that we wanted. This helps explain how an advertisement encourages us to imagine our hypothetical future selves, made more glamorous by the acquisition of a fun new thing: we envy these glamorous future visions of ourselves, depleting our satisfaction with our lives as they currently are, absent the product we might choose to buy.
