But for now, he pauses to consider an example: in an authoritative text on the Dutch painter Frans Hals, a learned art historian discourages readers from interpreting the powerful facial expressions and potentially unflattering characterizations assigned to the painting's subjects, urging them instead to consider the painting's "compositional unity" and drowning the work in historical context. Later in the chapter, he offers an alternative metric by which images could more productively be understood. Rather, they serve to distance us from the power of historical artworks, sanitizing them in a sweeping act of "cultural mystification" that upholds the values of those in power. Art history often deals with the "form," "status," "truth," or "beauty" that trained art historians assign to a painting, but Berger argues that these assumptions no longer accord with the world as it now exists.
#JOHN BERGER WAYS OF SEEING 2009 CHAPTER 1 QUOTES SERIES#
But often, the image's revelation of a "way of seeing" is overshadowed by a series of assumptions that we are taught to make when appraising a piece of art.
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This testimonial value makes images extremely powerful. Images, more so than any other relics from the past, offer a direct testimony as to how people saw-and, by extension, understood-the world. Images can preserve things as they once were, and simultaneously, preserve how their creator once saw their subject.
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In this sense, every image embodies what Berger calls "a way of seeing": a record of how its creator saw the world. To do so is to create an image: "an image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced." In so doing, we remove the image from the original circumstances under which it was seen. Likewise, we can attempt to capture what we see, reproducing or recreating it for others so that they can try to understand how we perceive the world. Our understanding of what we see doesn't generally align with the objective facts of what we're seeing: for example, we see the sun set every night, while we know that it isn't really "setting," but rather, the earth is simply revolving away from it. Thus begins Ways of Seeing, drawing our attention to the fraught relationship between vision, images, words, and meaning. Perception is an ongoing reality-we are always taking in the world, and only after the fact do we name it.
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When we inhabit the world, we are constantly seeing.