Coded Images
One of Berger's central points in Ways of Seeing is that images all contain more than what appears on the surface. Given that all images are man-made recreations of the way their creator saw the world, they are encoded with the creator's ideology. Throughout the text, Berger details the many ways in which images can be "unpacked" to reveal their underlying meaning: a family portrait in a beautiful garden can reinforce capitalist property relations, for example, or an advertisement featuring a nude woman can perpetuate gender inequality. When we "read" images, we look deeper into their meaning to understand how their formal qualities convey particular theoretical propositions.
(Anti)capitalism
Throughout the text—but especially in Chapter 5—Berger's writing is informed by Marxist thought. This is clear in his discussion of oil painting, which criticizes the medium for reducing all its subjects to commodities, glorifying private property. Here, Berger is implicitly making the anticapitalist proposition that art should be distinct from private property, or at the very least should not aspire to its glorification.
The Spectatorial Position
Another issue that Berger probes at length is the relationship between a viewer and the object of their sight. The act of looking at a painting is never one-sided or static, but rather, mutable and relational: different spectators will engage with the same painting differently. As a result, an artwork's meaning isn't located within the work itself, but rather, emerges as the spectator engages with it in their own personal way. As a result, the position of the spectator (both literal and ideological) is fundamental to the painting's meaning, which arises through their interpretation. How does the spectator "read" the symbols in the painting? Which formal characteristics do they choose to focus on? For example, Berger posits that the difference between a painting of a naked woman and a traditional "nude" is that the nude woman's nudity is constituted by and for the spectator—the painting is made so that the nude woman addresses the viewer in service of their fantasies. Even though the spectator is not literally part of the painting itself, their relationship to it is central to the meaning of the work.
Colonial Expansion
One theme that appears regularly in the oil paintings that Berger discusses is the expansion of European colonial power. Given that the tradition of oil painting he focuses on in Chapter 5 reached its peak between 1500 and 1900, colonial conquest features prominently into these paintings' subject matter. Some, like Holbein's The Ambassadors, explicitly picture tools for navigation and seafaring, glorifying colonial expansion as a noble and scientific mission. However, Berger critiques the worldview that underlies this colonial expansion, noting that the class responsible for colonization believed that the world existed to furnish their existence in it, a fundamentally narcissistic and exploitative state of mind. He also criticizes the relationship between the conqueror and the colonized people, noting that it gives rise to a self-perpetuating cycle in which the colonized individual is seen as sub-human. Here, Berger draws on the tradition of postcolonial theory that began to emerge in the 1960s thanks to philosophers such as Frantz Fanon.
Female Subjectivity
Throughout his discussion of the female nude, Berger evaluates whether the women represented in the paintings he discusses are represented fairly. As he states early in Chapter 3, the representational traditions that have dominated much of art history depict women as passive, surveying themselves and highly concerned with their appearances, whereas men are given greater agency and subjectivity. This is especially true in the case of the female nude, where the female subject's status as "nude," as opposed to simply "naked," is constituted by the presence of the (presumably male) spectator. The women in the paintings essentially watch themselves being looked at, positioning themselves as objects of the spectator's gaze, whereas men in comparable paintings appear to have other discernible traits, interests, qualities, and activities aside from presenting themselves to the spectator.
Spectatorship and Ownership
Berger emphasizes in Chapter 5 that, for most of the time that oil painting has existed, a painting's spectators were the people who owned it. Oil paintings especially were mainly on view for those who could afford to commission them. This helps explain why oil painting is so effective at displaying the desirability of property ownership: its historical purpose was to reinforce the value of the bourgeois classes' wealth, primarily circulating within elite milieux for most of history. It wasn't until the advent of mechanical reproduction that these images' viewership grew wider, which strengthens Berger's point from Chapter 1: reproducible images circulate more freely, meeting more viewers and thus opening themselves to a more diverse range of interpretations. Nowadays, in an era when images proliferate more widely than ever before, spectators—especially spectators of advertisements—are addressed as potential owners, as publicity images encourage us to imagine ourselves made happier by the acquisition of a new product. The relationship between spectatorship and ownership has effectively been reversed: while it used to be that only a select few already-rich viewers looked at the majority of images which served to uphold their wealth, now, everyone looks at images constantly, and these images seek to deplete our wealth in exchange for new commodities.
The "Deep" Oil Painting
Throughout Chapter 5, Berger describes a tradition in "average" oil painting which upholds the capitalist system of property relations by making it appear desirable to own more things. However, he contrasts this against a preferable trend that characterizes a far smaller proportion of oil paintings—the "masterful" turn, in which a select few talented artists can use the medium to depict something deeper or more existential than just simple property. One such artist is Rembrandt, who dutifully painted self-portraits throughout his life, eventually liberating himself from the traditional norms of oil painting and producing paintings with a heavier existential heft than the typical oil-painted portrait. Berger never outright states what this "question of existence" might mean, only faintly intimating that this is what sets the masterful oil paintings apart from the mediocre ones. We might infer that it has to do with the transcendence of material desire, the metaphysical intensity that the classical tradition of oil painting fails to fully capture.
