John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Already a while ago I started writing down bullet points about all the readings I had to do for the class, but I've never really been able to write a whole text about some of the readings because I've only read them once or I haven't read the whole article, so what I basically did and am still doing now, is re-reading all the readings I thought were a bit more difficult. So what follows, will be a series of posts about readings I had to do over the past few months, and I'm really sorry that I'm only starting to upload all of this material now, but I dedicated all of my time to my project development during the past weeks and so I completely forgot to continue working with the readings. 

I'm going to start of with the first chapter of John Berger's book Ways of Seeing, because some of the theory that Berger shares on these pages have become an essential part of my understanding of photography. 

In this first chapter, the author develops the different things that are involved in seeing, things that we often don't even take into account when looking at an object and 'seeing' it. 

He particularly emphasizes the fact that the way we see things is always determined by what we know. 'The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.' I think that this idea is something that one should always keep in mind when thinking about photography. People have different ways of seeing the world around them and of looking at a picture, because they have different backgrounds, different thoughts, beliefs and knowledge. 

Furthermore, Berger argues that images also show how something has looked to other people and later even the way the 'image-maker' looked at the object was taken into account when looking at a picture. 'An image became a record of how X had seen Y.' 

But he also says that often, when a photograph is considered as a work of art, people look at it differently, having 'a series of learned assumptions about art', such as taste, beauty, truth, etc...in mind. In Berger's eyes, these assumptions 'mystify rather than clarify' the past and the object. 

We no longer see the natural object as it is, but are influenced by a number of different factors. 

I think this idea is particularly interesting in photography because we all know it and have probably all experienced it ourselves. Going to see a photography exposition in a museum, we have a clear idea in mind how the pictures should look like, because after all it is an exposition and thus considered as 'art'. Hence, we have a whole lot of expectations how the pictures should look like to conform to the high expectations of a 'work of art'. 

Finally, Berger talks a bit more about photography and the change of it's meaning in history also emphasizing the fact that with the reproduction of the image, the picture kind of looses it's 'uniqueness'. 'What determines an image's value is not its meaning or its or quality of painting, but its uniqueness'. This is certainly not totally wrong, looking, for instance, at the Mona Lisa painting. What made it so famous? Why do people from all over the world, queue for hours to see the small painting in a massive museum that probably has other paintings, that are far more interesting? It is its uniqueness, the fact that this painting only exists once in the entire world. 

Berger concludes by arguing that the art of the past has become a political issue, and although this is certainly an important point of his analysis, the first part of this chapter has been more interesting for me as it has helped me realize how biased we actually are when looking at a picture, and even though we might try to turn off all these voices and ideas in our head, we can never really succeed in looking at a picture neutrally and see it's real nature. 

Reading:
John Berger - Ways of Seeing