Topic > The Relevance of John Berger's Way of Seeing Today

John Berger is a novelist, poet, art critic, and painter. His essay “Ways of Seeing” is widely known by acclaimed artists and university students. When it was first published in 1972, following its BBC programme, it shocked people with its perspective on viewing and understanding art; but is Ways of Seeing still useful and readable today? In my opinion yes, because he uses his platform to talk about the injustices and civilization that were happening at that time, he changes regulated ways of thinking, and most of his statements or ideas are still accurate and can be applied to the human brain today. She shares her political views on capitalism and Western society along with some Marxist ideologies and even uses her platform to talk about inequality and justice - comparing two images of women several times in her book, she stated that women are seen as objects, but goes on to underline the hypocrisy of our world: “You painted a naked woman because you liked to look at her,” Berger writes, “Put a mirror in her hand and called the painting 'Vanity,' thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your pleasure.” It was quite evident in the text that he was a supporter and had sympathy for the women's movement, interviewing an all-female cast and discussing issues such as empowerment. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay I agree that Berger is a liberator of images: he makes me revisit images and paintings in many different ways that I had never seen before; and it is pleasant to see new things in an old work of art; but while he appealed to many people in the 1970s with his interesting perspective and interpretations, the author's overall approach to the book is almost ostentatious due to his confident tone and general "know it all" statements... while that may be the case, I think it deals with both art and images quite well: it considers both factors, emotion, location, perspective, relationships, stories, etc. One of Berger's points of seeing is that all images contain more than what appears on the surface. He demonstrates this through the images in the text and makes us question every image we see. Throughout the text, Berger lists ways in which images can be "unpacked" to reveal their true meaning. My understanding of art in relation to images is that images require a certain narrative and language, and our language with the camera has radically changed our relationship with famous works of art, separating the masters from their context and making them mass produced: “By making the work of art transmissible, the camera multiplied its possible meanings and destroyed its only original meaning.” This observation seems even more present in our culture, where everyone with a phone is a photographer and takes digital photos, which constitute not only social media and digital maps, but also advertising and surveillance. Berger explains how the goddesses of art became models of advertising; Advertising tells us that purchasing a product will transform us by showing images of those who have already been transformed by it: these are the people we should aspire to be like. The image of an underwear model is desired by men and envied by women. other than the truth, he is still a man and therefore has no way of truly knowing if anything he wrote is actually true since he is just another outside observer. Which could then again be interpreted as childish, unnecessary,.