Opening with the statement ‘seeing comes before words’ Berger marks the act of perception as something which is consciously and culturally constructed, drawing from a past which ‘is not for living in is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act’. To Berger, seeing is less about spontaneity than habit and convention. The first serves as a gorgeously sophisticated, yet comprehensible, introduction to debates in subjectivity and perception as they may relate to the philosophy and theory of history. Of the seven essays which constitute Ways of Seeing, none are titled. I would like to toy with this idea of sexed embodiment as much in life as in Berger’s reading of artistic representation and its voyeuristic proclivities, pushing beyond the jaded polarity of bodily authority and objectification. Of particular interest is Berger’s idea of nakedness and the nude as expressive of one distinctly masculine and another distinctly feminine experience or sensibility. In noting traditions in European art dating from the fifteenth to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Berger makes considered reflections upon the intersections of seeing and possessing, convention and securing status – pondering the linear relationship between glamour, dreaming, and the language of publicity. Sharp but convivial and often magnetic, Berger’s writing on the function of art has an almost contemporary feel – a sensibility produced by an enduring fascination with aestheticism and the image. Perhaps the pre-eminent work of popular art history and criticism, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing manages to retain its sublime suggestive quality several decades after its initial publication in 1972.

Berger john ways of seeing