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The Art Book That Changed The Way I See
Ways of Seeing by John Berger
There aren’t many books that inspire me to return to them over and over again, but John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is one such book.
Ways of Seeing is about art history, and yet its ramifications are so much wider. It is truly to do with images. The core message of the book is that we live in a world saturated with images, and that the images around us don’t simply describe the world but actively shape many of our ideas and values.
The female nude and possession
Berger pays particular attention to the female nude in art and role of the male gaze in structuring the relations between men and women. He writes:
“In the art-form of the European nude the painters and spectator-owners were usually men and the persons treated as objects, usually women. This unequal relationship is so deeply embedded in our culture that it still structures the consciousness of many women. They do to themselves what men do to them. They survey, like men, their own femininity.”
Elsewhere, Berger states the case even more generally, applying it to all of Western culture:
“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at … The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed…
