Summary
When we inhabit the world, we are constantly seeing. Perception is an ongoing reality—we are always taking in the world, and only after the fact do we name it. Thus begins Ways of Seeing, drawing our attention to the fraught relationship between vision, images, words, and meaning. Our understanding of what we see doesn't generally align with the objective facts of what we're seeing: for example, we see the sun set every night, while we know that it isn't really "setting," but rather, the earth is simply revolving away from it. Likewise, we can attempt to capture what we see, reproducing or recreating it for others so that they can try to understand how we perceive the world. To do so is to create an image: "an image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced." In so doing, we remove the image from the original circumstances under which it was seen. In this sense, every image embodies what Berger calls "a way of seeing": a record of how its creator saw the world. Images can preserve things as they once were, and simultaneously, preserve how their creator once saw their subject. Images, more so than any other relics from the past, offer a direct testimony as to how people saw—and, by extension, understood—the world.
This testimonial value makes images extremely powerful. But often, the image's revelation of a "way of seeing" is overshadowed by a series of assumptions that we are taught to make when appraising a piece of art. Art history often deals with the "form," "status," "truth," or "beauty" that trained art historians assign to a painting, but Berger argues that these assumptions no longer accord with the world as it now exists. Rather, they serve to distance us from the power of historical artworks, sanitizing them in a sweeping act of "cultural mystification" that upholds the values of those in power. Later in the chapter, he offers an alternative metric by which images could more productively be understood. But for now, he pauses to consider an example: in an authoritative text on the Dutch painter Frans Hals, a learned art historian discourages readers from interpreting the powerful facial expressions and potentially unflattering characterizations assigned to the painting's subjects, urging them instead to consider the painting's "compositional unity" and drowning the work in historical context. To Berger, this interpretation forecloses meaningful exploration of the painting's value, discouraging viewers from engaging with it on their own terms, and, in so doing, stopping them from questioning the capitalist values that, Berger argues, underpin the work.
Several other art historical conventions are so entrenched that their political and ideological consequences are often ignored. One such convention is perspective, which centers the entire world of a painting on the eye of the spectator, reinforcing a narrative of individualism and Cartesian subjectivity ("I think, therefore, I am"). Perspective fell out of style with the advent of the camera, which made it evident that the passage of time is fundamental to our experience of the visual. As cameras changed and evolved, eventually producing the movie camera, our understanding of the visible also changed: for example, paintings that were once sequestered in a specific location, such as inside a church, could suddenly be photographed and videotaped and infinitely reproduced, severed from the unique singularity of their original location. The painting's meaning, which was once fixed by the stability of its location, suddenly becomes changeable.
This freeing up of a painting's value due to reproduction has immense revolutionary potential, if used wisely. But it can also continue to uphold the powers that be. Once a painting is reproduced, the meaning of the original shifts: it becomes the original of a reproduction, whose value is affirmed by its rarity. Thus, the original version of a painting that has been reproduced widely attains a kind of cult value, which Berger calls "entirely bogus": this cult value is the final desperate attempt on the part of the ruling class to justify the values that underpin their domination, falsely declaring the art object mysteriously unique and exclusive in an era when mass reproduction has made uniqueness appear impossible. A handful of charts illustrate that this narrative is especially believed by the working class, who associate art museums with churches, worshipping the mystery of unaccountable wealth and value. To Berger's mind, this pattern ought to be reversed by encouraging the proletariat to seize the "means of reproduction."
Importantly, when images are reproduced, their meaning often changes. Often, reproductions are cropped, edited, or shown out of context, allowing them to be mobilized in the service of an argument unrelated to their original meaning. This takes place everywhere from art history textbooks to advertisements, forcing us to question how an image's context inevitably impacts our understanding of it. But, on the flip side, this also means that we—and here Berger means the left or those aligned against the ruling classes—can change an image's meaning by reproducing it under more favorable circumstances. Here, Berger finally offers us a more productive metric to judge whether we like an artwork: whether it resonates with us personally, not as a nostalgic document of the past or rarefied historical relic, but as a powerful composition that strikes us when we see it in the present. He illustrates this using the example of a bulletin board where someone might pin images that are meaningful to them—it is this kind of casual approach to appraising an image's value that Berger advocates, viewing it as the antidote to an art historical tradition that encourages us to view paintings with distanced contemplation or awe at their historical (and, by extension, financial) value. In this age of reproduction, original paintings gain a new value as the "silent," "still" counterparts to reproducible images: they bear the trace of the painter, allowing past and present to converge. This power doesn't diminish when paintings are reproduced—rather, it depends on the viewer's preexisting familiarity with the image, which is made possible by its widespread reproduction.
By approaching artworks in this way, we can question the role of paintings from the past, destabilizing the predominant historical narrative that they are solely the territory of the wealthy, educated elite. While art has, for most of history, existed at a certain remove from everyday life, the advent of mass reproduction wears away at this rarefied designation, allowing more people to enjoy more art more frequently. But this possibility isn't often taken advantage of, because the ruling class has managed to uphold the popular belief that art can only be understood or appreciated by the elite. Berger urges us to consider a "new language of images" in which anyone can forge a meaningful relationship to the past by engaging with art. Herein lies the political urgency of understanding art history: understanding this "language of images" prevents us from being cut off from the past, enabling us to become "active agents" in our understanding of history, and thus give meaning to our lives.
Analysis
Ways of Seeing opens with an observation that is somewhat paradoxical for a written text: "Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak." Indeed, in the opening line of his text, Berger acknowledges the insufficiency of written language itself, noting that vision is continuous and immediate, while the words that we use to name what we see can only be conjured after the fact. Seeing, he explains, "establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it." Because of this disconnect, our knowledge of how the world works never quite fits what we see of it: for example, we see the sun set every night, and we know that this is because the Earth is rotating away from it, but this explanation is not fully consistent with what we can see. As another example, Berger points out Rene Magritte's painting The Key of Dreams, which depicts four objects labelled as other objects: a horse, a clock, a pitcher, and a suitcase are designated as "the door, the wind, the bird, and the valise" respectively. Only the final item matches up with its label (valise is French for suitcase), gesturing towards the gap between how we name items and how we understand their meaning.
But before he can dive head-on into the complicated nuances of linguistics, Berger observes: "this seeing which comes before words, and can never be quite covered by them, is not a question of mechanically reacting to stimuli." Sure, certain sights—the sight of one's lover, for instance—conjure intense emotions that can't quite be described, this doesn't mean that vision is solely a machine-like way of eliciting emotional responses to what we see in the world. Vision is continuous, and to see something implies that, conversely, we can be seen from (or even by) that thing. Vision is reciprocal, and when we discuss what we see with others, we are attempting to vivify the way that we see the world or understand the way that someone else does. In this sense, there is no single vision of the world—or, as Berger puts it, "way of seeing." Instead, there are a multiplicity of "ways of seeing," as many ways of visualizing and then verbalizing the world as there are people in it.
One way that we can try to describe our particular way of seeing to others is through images: "An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced." Detached from the original conditions under which it was first seen, an image constitutes an attempt on the part of its maker to share the way that they saw a particular moment or event. With this in mind, Berger offers one of his most famous propositions: "Every image embodies a way of seeing." While we may want to believe that images offer objective records of the world, every single one—including photographs, which are typically assumed to be objective mechanical records—reflects its maker's "way of seeing." When a photographer decides what to include in the frame before they snap a photograph, they're transmitting their way of seeing; the same is true of a painter who, consciously or not, emphasizes certain features of their subject as they apply paint to the canvas. Likewise, when we view images, our understanding of them is impacted by our own way of seeing. For example, when we see a photograph with multiple subjects, our eyes may be drawn to one in particular (again, a lover, for example)—not because they were emphasized by the photographer in any particular way, but because they were known or special to us already.
Berger explains that images' power resides in the fact that they can outlast what they represent: they depict people as young long after they have aged and died, or landscapes even after they have changed. But because all images embody a certain way of seeing, images don't just index how their subjects once looked: they represent how their subjects once looked to the people who made the images. This fact was recognized as early as the Renaissance, when philosophy turned towards recognizing individuality. As a result, Berger contends that "images are more precise and richer than literature": not because literature is not a valuable historical document, but simply because images all implicitly transmit their maker's understanding of the visible.
The way that we look at an image can determine our understanding of it just as strongly as the views of the artist that are encoded within it, Berger continues. When we look at a painting, for example, our impression is determined by a whole host of assumptions we have learned to make about art's value, causing us to like (or dislike) it based on our inherited beliefs about its beauty, form, status, claim to "truth," etc. According to Berger, these assumptions aren't useful, as they simply obscure the past. He doesn't offer a preferable metric quite yet, but does propose that "history" is constituted by the relation between the present and the past, and that relation is mystified by an art-historical tradition that makes artworks unnecessarily remote. When we look unquestioningly at the art of the past, we fall privy to a constructed history that justifies the role of the ruling class—precisely because the ruling class determines the dominant narrative of art history.
With this in mind, Berger turns to an example: a seminal volume on the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Frans Hals. Nearing the end of his life, an impoverished Hals was granted peat on public charity, preventing him from freezing to death during the winter. In the last two paintings he ever made, Hals was commissioned to portray the Governors and Governesses of the Alms House that gave him the peat, recognizing the administrators of his charity. The author of the book on Hals writes about the paintings in a way that explicitly conveys his own bias: he claims that Hals did not paint the Governors or Governesses in the spirit of bitterness, reading the painting's composition as the source of its emotional charge. While these interpretations are as logical as any, Berger points out that "very little is known about Hals or the Regents who commissioned him," encouraging us to look at the paintings and interpret, for ourselves, how Hals saw his subjects. The author of the book on Hals, who Berger refers to generically as "the art historian" in order to draw our attention to how widespread his beliefs are, discourages this kind of direct judgement. Berger, on the other hand, draws our attention to aspects of the painting that could be understood as confrontational, urging us to reconsider the art historian's sanitized assessment of where the painting's emotional heft lies. In obscuring these features, the art historian has mystified the past, downplaying the drama of Hals' story, explaining away the impressions that might otherwise be evident to the viewer. Why does this particular example matter? Well, according to Berger, "Hals was the first portraitist to paint the new characters and expressions created by capitalism." By the art historian's dry, formal assessment, such a conclusion might never have been reached. Thus, Berger explains, our dependence on the inherited narratives of art history only serves to rewrite the past in favor of those in power.
He then briefly detours into explaining the convention of perspective. Established during the Renaissance, perspective creates the illusion of three-dimensional space by centering the image on the eye of a hypothetical beholder, depicting the world as though it recedes into a specific point on the horizon. It is implied by this convention that perspective is the most "realistic" form of painting, but Berger contests this, critiquing the fact that in a perspectival work, "the visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God." Paradoxically, perspective is addressed to a single spectator who can only be in one place at one time—not very godlike at all. The shortcomings of perspective became gradually apparent following the invention of the camera: the camera isolated experience into a single moment by photographing it, showing that our lived experience of the visible is inextricable from the lapsing of time. What you see is as dependent on your position in time as on your position in space. Resultantly, it became impossible to imagine a world where everything visible converges to the spectator's eye at a single point. This became especially evident with the advent of the movie camera, which demonstrated that "there was no centre." Following this discovery, "the visible came to mean something different."
How, exactly, did the advent of the camera change our understanding of the visible? Berger continues to explain that, originally, paintings were integral to the place where they resided, such as the interior of a church. In this sense, a painting's uniqueness derived from the uniqueness of the place where it was on view. Sure, paintings could be moved—but at the end of the day, they could only be seen in one place at one time. When a camera reproduces a painting by photographing it, Berger writes, it destroys the painting's uniqueness. While this may sound detrimental, Berger actually sees it as positive: it opens the door to a multiplicity of meanings and understandings, and allows the painting to be seen and enjoyed by a wider and more diverse crowd of people. Here (and throughout the chapter), he draws heavily on the work of Frankfurt School critical theorist Walter Benjamin. In his 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility, Benjamin posits that mass reproduction severs artworks from their "aura," the abstract sense of rarified wonder attached to an absolutely unique work of art. In the absence of the aura, a work can meet the viewer halfway, opening itself up to a plurality of diverse interpretations.
It's important to note, however, that reproductions also distort the meaning of the original. Berger offers the example of the Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci, a widely reproduced (and, by extension, widely recognized) painting. Whenever one views the original, which hangs at the National Gallery, they will inevitably regard it differently than had it not been reproduced: they will see it as the original of a reproduction. This privileged status of originality becomes the source of a quasi-religious value—a religiosity that Berger calls "entirely bogus," as it is a market value premised on a religious value that the market precisely cannot admit. Berger observes that a viewer who visits the original painting will likely be struck more profoundly by its status as a unique original than by any of the painting's actual details. Similarly, he offers the example of The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist, a painting that was relatively unknown until it sold to an American buyer for 2.5 million British pounds (mind you, this was written in the 1970s, so due to inflation, that price would be even higher now). After receiving this high market valuation, the painting was placed in a chapel-like room of its own, behind bulletproof glass. Visitors are impressed not by the meaning of its image, but by of its market value. This sense of economically-informed bogus religiosity, according to Berger, replaces what paintings lost when they became reproducible: in a vain attempt to maintain the status of a unique original (an attempt that Berger notes is underwritten by "oligarchic, undemocratic" values), this mystifying semi-spiritual sense of originality that characterizes the experience of viewing a valuable painting has been manufactured.
Berger then offers us some charts, which show that the majority of the population believes that art museums "are full of holy relics which refer to a mystery which excludes them." To the majority of people across the social classes, art galleries resemble churches, with some highly educated individuals likening them to lecture halls. In either case, the meanings of the paintings that hang in these museums no longer resides within the paintings themselves—they have become translated into information. He then notes that reproduction often involves changing an image, whether through cropping it or shifting its context. One such example takes place when paintings are reproduced within films: the durational dimension of a film allows the painting to be analyzed in time, focusing on certain details in a specific order. When this happens, the painting inevitably becomes part of the filmmaker's particular narrative. On the other hand, when a painting is seen in person, the viewer has the freedom to examine each element in his own time, perhaps revisiting parts or changing his mind. In this sense, the painting "maintains its own authority" when viewed statically and in-person. Reproductions also change the meanings of paintings by placing them alongside words. Berger reproduces an image of Van Gogh's Wheatfield with Crows. On the next page, the painting is reproduced again, alongside the caption: "This is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself." It's hard to define precisely how this caption changes the image, but it's clear that it does.
With all this in mind, Berger makes the argument that reproduced images easily become mobilized to make arguments that are unrelated to their original or independent meaning. Because works of art are reproducible, they can easily be placed into new contexts, their meaning changing based on the text or other images that accompany them. Theoretically, this offers great revolutionary potential—but as Berger notes, artworks are most often reproduced in contexts that uphold existing hierarchies. Here, he inserts two illustrations of paintings being used in advertisements, exemplifying his point. "The means of reproduction," he writes, "are used politically and commercially to disguise or deny what their existence makes possible." Essentially, this is to say that, while mass reproducibility ought to make images more proletarian, it's generally only those already in power who successfully cash in (often literally) on the possibility of reproducing images for ideological ends.
So how can everyday citizens benefit from the capacity to reproduce images? Berger offers the example of pinboards where people often collect images, letters, newspaper clippings, and postcards that they've amassed according to their personal investment in them. "Logically," says Berger, "these boards should replace museums." By this, he seems to say that we ought to approach original works of art for their sentimental value, or whatever other qualities we're naturally drawn to in them, not necessarily for their presumed value, whether economic or quasi-religious. However, this is certainly not to say that original works of art are useless or museums should be destroyed: to Berger, the value of an original work lies in its silence and stillness: hanging on the wall of a gallery, an original painting is never just pure information: it bears the trace of the artist who created it, however long ago, closing a gap between the past and present whenever we regard the artist's handiwork. This relationship between the past and present is made richer by how we have previously experienced a painting's reproductions, not diminished by it. In this sense, to appreciate an image enough to add it to our hypothetical pinboard is to experience its full meaning.
To end the chapter, Berger poses a prescient question: "To whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong?" He encourages us to take hold of the art historical narrative by appreciating art by applying it to our own lives, evaluating it on this basis rather than by some abstract metric such as its "realism" or "beauty." For most of art history, visual art has been a rarified realm, distancing it from everyday life and aligning it with those in power. To Berger, the capacity for mass reproduction is, for the first time, challenging this preserve: images now surround us "in the same way as a language surrounds us," freed into the mainstream of everyday life. The only remaining problem, then, is that not enough people understand how to read and mobilize images for their own means—a problem that Berger attempts to begin solving by bringing our attention to it over the course of this chapter.
