''Çıplak olduklarını fark ettiler, çünkü elmayı yediklerinden birbirlerini değişik görmeye başladılar. Çıplaklık, bakanın zihninde doğmuş oldu.''

Öyle ki; Berger yalnızca resim sanatındaki akımları yorumlamıyor, sıra dışı bir pencereden toplumda kadının yeri, sınıfsal farklılıklar hatta ve hatta reklamın insanın öz değerindeki etkisini bile irdeliyor.

“There is more than meets the eye”
I recently reread Kenneth Clark's Civilization. It was based on a British documentary TV series, from the end of the 1960s. In it Clark offers a very own, but still fairly classic introduction to art. The book of John Berger (1926-2017) and the accompanying TV-series (look it up on You Tube!) was released in 1972 and was the antipode of Clark’s. Berger looked at the works of art very differently, or more correctly: he looked at the way we "see" very differently.

To start with, he makes the reader-viewer aware of the world behind the artworks, the social context in which they came about. It is an exquisite analysis that he borrows from philosopher Walter Benjamin. Knowing that the 17th-century Dutch painter Frans Hals, for example, lived in bitter poverty when he painted group portraits of well-off citizens, does indeed make you look at those works of art very differently. With this other approach, Berger knocked down quite some sacred houses, especially those of traditional art critics and their emphasis on the creative genius and timelessness of works of art. He was forcefully criticized for it, but it must be said that he himself did not shy away from sharp polemics, also in this booklet.

But Berger offers more: he also shows that ‘seeing’ happens in a specific, social context. His analysis of how women take into account how they are viewed (especially by men) is particularly lucid and unfortunately still topical. The way in which publicity influences and manipulates our visual language is also aptly articulated and represented. Berger also demonstrates the enormous impact of new techniques (reprography and the camera in Berger's time), making artworks available permanently and everywhere, regardless of their context, and therefore they are seen in a different way than before.

I can imagine that 50 years ago this little book was a real eye-opener (pun intended). Nevertheless, during the reading, the impression came to me that the work is not really fresh anymore. Perhaps that is because a number of his views have since become commonplace. Perhaps it is also due to the layout of the booklet, with small black-and-white illustrations. But probably it’s Berger's rather classic marxist discourse that makes it seem a bit outdated: using words such as "capitalist exploitation of the masses", "deprivation" and "proletariat" now, in the 21st century, seems quite dated and even touching. Times evolve rapidly, and so does ‘seeing”.

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اگر کتاب رو خوندید و یا حتی نخوندید . حتما مستند " راه های نگریستن " رو که خود جان برجر ساخته ببنید . مستند بی نظیری که حتی جامع تر از کتابه .
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ممنون آقای جان برجر
بیشتر برای مستند ❤

'The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless.' This book presents you with some really rare and interesting insights that will make you a lot to think about. It gives you evidence really good one that how society and media have influenced our psych.
Its a great introduction for someone who is interested in arts and marketing. It gives you a lot of insights about the earlier time when media wasn't that influential with the current time, where media and advertising plays a very major role in defining art and artists.
Berger talks about tradition and how it has influenced us, with also talking about the role of gender, how the art world has depicted both the sexes.

This book really opens your eyes to different ways of seeing and many perspectives. I enjoyed reading this a lot, it will teach you a lot.

Highly Recommended.

Happy reading!

Leuk boekje over de verschillende vormen van blik in kunstwerken en beelden. Van 16de eeuwse olieverfschilderijen tot hedendaagse reclamecampagnes. Sterke focus op klasse en sociale orde die aanwezig is in het kijken en bekeken worden.

Berger’in düşünme biçimine, üslubuna, tezlerini temellendirme & derinleştirme tarzına bayıldım. Ne yazmışsa okumak, ne anlatmışsa dinlemek istiyorum. Bana daha çok Berger verin, üzerime Berger atın, beni Berger'e boğun.

2007 wrote: This book, based on a television series, explores how the art world of now has come to be by exploring what art was to humans in the past. The theories presented are very interesting and are posed with pictorial references that do very well to prove points. One interesting chapter deals exclusively with the 'Nude' in art overtime. Overtime it has been reviled, reveared, copied, censored, hidden, hoarded and abstracted. Another great chapter deals in the context in which people see art, in contrast to how they might have been meant to see it by the artist. Many pieces are painted as singular wall decorations, but now are hanging in museums next to a hundred other of these decorations. Overtime people now view art online or in sections of video, where a director controls the viewers eyes as what to see through camera tricks and narration. The chapter contemplates and guesses how this might change to experience of art over time. Changing from entertainment, to a more scholarly subject. A very interesting read.

"We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves"

i want to know who signed off on publishing a whole book in helvetica bold... and "pictorial essays" where every picture is the size of my thumb...

This book is nothing short of revolutionary. It is an examination of visual culture that remains as pertinent today as it was when it was first printed in 1972. Based on a BBC television series of the same name, the book is both an assessment and an examination of the methods in which we identify art, advertisements, and media, making it an indispensable read for anyone interested in art, media, or cultural studies. The narrative technique of the author is piercing, challenging, and handy, challenging traditional narratives surrounding art and its history. Fundamental in his argument is the notion that the way we see things is fashioned by an assortment of social, artistic, and political factors. This intuition is expressly ostensible in his argument of how the female body is depicted in Western art. Berger sensitively dismembers the "male gaze," a term that, while not coined in this book, is seriously implied in his scrutiny. He shows how women are every so often portrayed not as subjects in their own right but as objects for male ingesting, a critique that feels startlingly contemporary. The book's structure is unconventional and engaging. Interspersed with essays are pages of images—paintings, advertisements, and photographs—that invite readers to energetically engage with the text and draw their conclusions. Berger does not simply tell his audience what to think; he provides a framework for questioning assumptions, a method for uncovering hidden ideologies in visual representation. One of the most striking chapters deals with the commodification of art through reproduction. Berger elucidates how the original context of a work of art is altered when it is removed from its historical and physical setting. This shift transforms the art into a commodity, stripping it of its unique aura and re-contextualizing it in ways that can serve capitalist interests. His debate anticipates considerations about digital reproduction and meme culture, making it a perceptive read for today’s digital age. Some readers might find Berger's Marxist lens too unyielding or reductive, particularly in his thoughts on capitalism and class. However, this viewpoint offers a critical foundation that goads readers to reflect on power dynamics in visual culture. Even if one does not go along with all of Berger's assumptions, the questions he raises remain intensely significant. At just over 150 pages, this tome is a summarizing yet dominant text. Its combination of visual and textual analysis, pooled with the author’s vibrant and enthralling prose, makes it a transformative read. It challenges readers not only to reconsider how they view art but also to interrogate the broader forces shaping their perceptions. This book is more than an assessment of art history—it’s a call to consciousness, an aide-mémoire that every image carries a antiquity and a set of assumptions. This book invites us to look deeper and think harder, making it an all-time enduring classic.

I am not the audience for this book, mainly because I've already read and more or less digested the handful of essays and ideas on which it is based. The seven chapters break down fairly simply.

1: Benjamin's 'Work of Art'--the ability to reproduce images alters the way we encounter works of art. This seems reasonable. Nobody gets to see a Giotto without having seen a reproduction first, except someone who has no interest in the Giotto in the first place. But Berger et al* go a step further: we need to use the fact that we encounter works of art differently to undermine the ruling class's privilege and the "specialized experts who are the clerks of the nostalgia of a ruling class in decline." That's on page 32. Part of me, a large part, laments the fact that you'd never get that published today, not even on a website. Another part of me laments the stupidity of intellectuals who put their faith in the inherent goodness of The People. The People does not have a good track record when it comes to art appreciation. That's not to say that people can't learn to appreciate art, only that We are no better and no worse than the ruling class was. We need to learn, we need to be taught, you can't do that if you assume that We are inherently able to do the right thing.

2 & 3: Women are depicted differently from men, and, frankly, not in ways that are healthy for anyone, but particularly not for women. I agree. Which makes it breathtaking to see the authors get so many things wrong, either intentionally (cutting short the bible verse in which God punishes Eve *and Adam*); stupidly (non-Western art forms show women as active participants in sex, so that are isn't morally dubious); or in ways that are, ahem, temporally bound ("Hair is associated with sexual power, with passion." Seventies!).

5: Oil paintings are bourgeois and generally not morally okay. Holbein's 'Ambassadors' is read as an example of this; the incredible distorted skull in the painting is the exception which proves the rule of oil paintings rather than, you know, showing that oil paintings can be self-critical, as are most good artworks of any kind. In general, the lesson of this book is that all art is bad for you, except the pieces that the authors of this book like. They like pieces by artists who can plausibly be turned into radicals, because only radicals can be interesting (Franz Hals; William Blake). They don't discuss the 20th century at all (I know they know that twentieth century art exists; perhaps, as good Benjaminian Marxists, they don't like abstraction or difficulty). They're also very uncomfortable with religious art, and want to group, e.g., Ambrosius Benson's Mary Magdalene with the absurd and/or pornographic Magdalene of later times, rather than admitting the rather obvious differences (Benson's is rich, but not, how can I put this... naked and disheveled.) Since the authors have a hard time saying what they actually like (vs. what they suspect is oppressive), you get idiocies like this: Rembrandt's famous late portrait shows a man for whom "all has gone except a sense of the question of existence, of existence as a question." A little thought would show that this is the sort of conservative pablum Great Artists have been serving up for generations.

6 & 7: Advertizing uses art to make you think you want things you don't want and that you can get them, so you don't need to think about what you really want, e.g., more time away from the office. This is true.

In sum: I was sucked in by the idea that this was a book about understanding art. It is not. It is critical theory for high-school readers. Good for what it is, but extremely narrow in scope, and quite harmful for anyone who swallows it whole rather than taking a few minutes to worry away at its assumptions. Harmful because those who accept it will say silly things, and because those who read it and reject it out of hand (due to the rhetoric, bad arguments, or conceptual confusion) won't be challenged to, you know, care about other people.


* Humorous aspect of this book: it makes a big deal about how it was written by a group of people, because, you know, individuals are bad, and groups are good. You'll note that the book is sold as a book by John Berger. You can draw the conclusion.

n   "Seeing comes before words.”n

Ways of reading - - meaning/ analysis. Personal perspective and context of writing or image.

n  n

There is a divergence between looking and seeing art and literature. Such as, if one were to apply Marxist literary criticism (Ideology) when examining a work of art. Art is in essence propaganda, thus what it represents is a statement/ critique of capitalism and social hierarchy.

If one observes the surface value or façade of art, you will instantaneously connect with its beauty and profundity. Yet, what it represents, in terms of societal power and denotation is fundamental to its double optic.

(Berger, 1972, p.32) “Art critiques’ say it has no social or cultural meaning…” However Berger states that the viewer must be open to all aspects

The tension between the two aspects, [formalism and materialism] is acute. If you remain subjective and open your mind to all the potential possibilities, then the mystification of an artwork is unravelled. One indeed uses the past to justify the present, for history is always changing and evolving.

‘Fear of the present leads to mystification of the past’

n  n

what we see is affected by what we know or what we believe
The physical existence of something contains specific connotation, yet the metaphorical meaning behind something [i.e. iconology and symbolic representation] is part of a ‘double optic’. You cannot help but be magnetized by the hypocrisy of such a hypocritical undertone to a reproduced work of art!

There is a continuum of thought during the process or act of looking and seeing an image, for instance regarding being and seeming. For, being pushes through what is seen, like showing something rather than telling something (in words). If text accompanies an artwork, then it may enhance or exemplify what is implied.


This deeply thought-provoking, philosophical piece of literature is a fascinating exploration into what we think we know…