Summary
The second chapter of Ways of Seeing is made up entirely of images. Women are central to each image in this chapter.
The first is a photograph of a woman at work in what appears to be a photo studio. She focuses on her work, looking away from the camera, while three large photos of women—apparently advertisements or magazine editorials—rest on the wall behind her. Next comes a woman seated in the backseat of a luxurious car, eyes closed, clutching an expensive-looking purse as spectators stare into the car window looking confused and excited. On the opposite page is a photo of two figures; it's unclear whether they're women or mannequins. Both have glamorous hairdos, and a male figure is visible in the background, where he appears to be building something. Below that, a photo from a magazine is reprinted, depicting a woman in an evening gown on the red carpet as three men stare at her approvingly.
On the following page, five images are collaged, comparing various representations of female nudes from across art history: a Giacometti sculpture, an erotic-looking photograph, and an Impressionist painting are all all juxtaposed against one another. On the opposite page, a single painting is centered mid-page: the Rembrandt painting Bathsheba, depicting a nude woman with a servant crouching at her foot.
The next spread is a collage of advertising photos, punctuated on the far right-hand side by a still life of a table set for a banquet. In each of the advertisements, a fragment of a woman's body is shown, as a knee, a mouth, a breast, or a buttock appears before the camera, zoomed-in and aggressively cropped. Only one image depicts a woman with a visible face; it's partially obscured by her upturned arm as she pulls her shirt over her head as if midway through removing it.
The following page shows a photo of a crowded escalator packed with smartly-dressed commuters, an advertisement for shapewear where a long-haired woman is seen from behind as she poses in front of a mirror, and a photograph taken over a woman's shoulder as she applies makeup in a tabletop mirror. Across from these, two images dominate the following page. Judgment of Paris by Peter Paul Rubens takes up most of the page, depicting three naked women (centered among them, Helen of Troy), vying for the designation of "most beautiful" as a cloud of cherubs presides over them; below, a woman is seen from behind, perched seductively on a chair, looking into a sea of cameras.
Analysis
This is one of three chapters in Ways of Seeing that contains no text, only images. Berger refers to these chapters in the introduction as "essays," illustrating his point that images, when selected and arranged in a certain order, can constitute an argument on their own, even without the aid of words. Although he notes in the same introduction that the chapters of the book can be read in any order, this photo essay comes directly before a chapter where he writes about the female nude in art history, setting the stage for his future analysis should the viewer choose to read them in order. Because there are no words, this essay is highly open to subjective interpretation—no analysis of its content should be considered definitive; rather, it's just one possible way of reading the argument that Berger has constructed through these images.
The first spread in this chapter depicts two people in what appears to be the process of image-making: a woman in a photo studio, and a man, engaged in a task we can't see, framed behind two mannequins. It's not quite clear what either one is doing, but the viewer might infer from their surroundings that they are at work as photographers or designers. Below each of these images, a second photo resides. Both of the bottom photos depict situations that radiate glamour: a woman in the backseat of a car wearing an elegant dress and purse, with viewers peeking in the car window, and, on the other page, another woman, hair similarly coiffed, photographed on the red carpet for a magazine editorial. In both of the bottom photos, the women are being watched: by the pedestrians outside the car in the first, and by three men on the red carpet in the second. Considered together, these elements stage several of the questions that Berger has hinted at in the last chapter: how are images produced? How do the conditions of their production impact the "ways of seeing" that are implicit within them? Recalling Chapter 1, a reader might question how the subjects of the top two photographs—the image-makers—are responsible for shaping the ideological regimes of the bottom photographs, which depict highly stylized women being looked at. The presence of women foreshadows the upcoming chapter, where Berger will elaborate on his famous statement that, often in art, "men act" while "women appear." However, this is complicated by the fact that the image-maker on the left-hand page is a woman: is she actively participating in a regime of visual conventions that, as Berger will later explain, often oppresses women? Or rather, has she wrested the power and created oppositional work, shaped by her own more radical way of seeing? These are questions that we can never answer, due to the nature of these photographs: they are deliberately withholding, never giving us enough information to reach any definitive conclusions about how to interpret them.
The following spread depicts a collage of various female nudes. These vary substantially: some, like the Giacometti statue, are hardly recognizable as women; others, like the two photographs (which, unlike the famous artworks, aren't attributed or named in the index), appear to have been made for the purpose of erotic appeal. There are six images on the left page, collaged tightly, calling attention to the differences between them. One might question how each of the different representational approaches employed in each of these paintings speaks to their artist's view of the world—especially, perhaps, how they saw and engaged with women. This calls us back to Berger's assertion in Chapter 1 that painting is an especially valuable historical document because it immortalizes the way the world existed as seen by a given artist at a given time. On the opposite page, there is only one painting: Bathsheba by Rembrandt. This painting depicts Bathsheba, a biblical figure who was so beautiful that King David sent her husband to perish at war in order to have an affair with her. But why does she get the whole page to herself, while six images, some depicting women who come closer to today's conventional beauty standards, are squeezed into the page opposite it? Perhaps this means to draw attention to the arbitrary and constructed nature of beauty standards altogether, reminding us that the features that have historically been considered "beautiful" constantly change. Interestingly, all of the artworks that are accredited in this spread were made by men: Picasso, Gaugin, Modigliani, Giacometti, and Rembrandt. However, no other generalizations can really be made to unite the images, aside from pointing out that they're all nude. It's not as though all the images are uniformly sexualized, or necessarily degrading—many are intriguing, flattering, or creative representations. Indeed, Berger's argument is far more complex than simply suggesting that images of nude women are misogynistic—but exactly how this is the case, he won't reveal until the following essay.
Next is a spread of advertisements. In all of these images, women's bodies are shown in fragments, but never in whole. Here, Berger seems to propose a connection between chapters 3 and 7, which deal with female representation and advertising images respectively. In each of these images, a female body part, severed from the whole, is employed to make a product look desirable, whether it's a tongue reaching out to a popsicle (advertising lipstick) or an exposed breast and delicate hand selling spray-on deodorant. All of these images are united by the fact that they exploit the attention-grabbing qualities of female sexuality in order to sell a product, drawing attention to the interrelated systems of capitalism and misogyny. If, as Berger suggests in Chapter 1, all images are documents of the ideological conditions under which they were created, then these advertisements index a culture of misogyny and exploitation. Interestingly, a couple of images on this page don't contain female subjects—they show decadent arrangements of food on tables set for banquets. One appears to be a photo from a cooking magazine, one an oil painting, and one an unattributed photograph of a large quantity of meat on a table. The connection between these images and the highly sexualized advertisements is left open-ended. One possible reading might be that these advertisements figure the female body itself as something appealing to be consumed, not unlike the mouth-watering displays of food on the tables.
The next spread presents an even more obscure collection of images. On the far left, a woman is shown nearly nude from behind as she gazes into a mirror, her long blonde hair cascading down her back. Her face is not visible in the reflection; her folded arms cover her ostensibly naked chest. Text in the lower right corner suggests that this is an advertisement: "Next to myself I like Vedo." Vedo would seem to be the brand of pantyhose the woman wears--but this is one of the last things about the image to strike the viewer. On the top right of that page, a group of people in businesslike dress are packed onto escalators that appear to be in a metro station (it looks like a stop on the London Tube, but since Berger doesn't credit this image in the index, we can't know for sure). Below that, a woman is seen from over the shoulder as she applies makeup in a mirror, her face visible only as a reflection. The opposite page contains a Rubens painting centering on three nude women, and a photograph of a busty woman, head turned away from the camera, facing into a sea of other cameras. Her identity is unclear; the pose suggests Marilyn Monroe, but again, without additional context, it's hard to know. Much more so than the previous spreads in this chapter, these images seem unrelated. One might note that several deal with how women present themselves: in three of these images, the female subjects are turned away from the viewer, addressing another subject—the media or their own reflection. In the Rubens painting, the central figure, Helen of Troy, receives an apple from Paris, christening her the most beautiful woman in the world. The arrangement of the painting suggests the three nude female subjects to be in conversation with two men, also in the nude. One woman is turned away from the viewer, though it's unclear who she addresses—perhaps an ominous-looking figure in the upper-left-hand corner, or maybe a cloud full of cherubim that hovers above them. However, the image with the escalators lacks any features that appear to relate it to the others on this spread. Thus, the connection can only be speculated: it could be read as a metaphor for metropolitan life, which is pervaded by the precise kind of capitalism that produces publicity images such as those seen on this page and the previous spread. It could also be understood as a "realistic" depiction of women, nearly indistinguishable from the men in the picture, although the previous chapter cautions us against employing "realism" as a metric to judge images because no photograph is ever an objective document.
