Looking, then seeing
Lately I’ve become interested in how images shape me. The more I read about visual culture, art history or photography, the more I notice it filtering into my own work. My compositions feel more considered and the conversations I have with other people about creating and creative practices in general have become deeper.
My grandad gave me a copy of Ways of Seeing by John Berger for Christmas. He’d mentioned it to me a few times before, suggesting I’d enjoy it, so I finally opened it on the flight to Ibiza last month, where I was shooting a campaign.
It consists of seven essays: some text-only, some pairing text with images, and others made up solely of images. It invites you to reflect on the early oil paintings of Western Europe. What purposes they served, and what they tell us about ownership, censorship, and hierarchy. As well as power, gender and the act of looking. A skill that can be honed and practiced like any other. Berger then draws a line from these paintings to modern advertising and the carefully constructed public images that surround us today. All day, every day.
It’s a beautiful little book if you’re interested in art history, photography, or feminism. More than anything, it’s worth it to sit with the uncaptioned paintings before reading Berger’s interpretations. Turning pages and asking your own questions and arriving at your own conclusions.
I’ve recorded some of my favourite passages below, mainly for me to come back to but I’ve published them here in case you find enjoyment in them too.
‘A woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expression, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste - indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence, Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an almost physical emanation, a kind of heat or smell or aura.’
‘She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.’
Essay 3 - Despite this book being fifty years plus old I really enjoyed how accurately this passage describes the self-vigilance and divided inner world that seems an inextricable part of being a woman.
‘..he did everything he could to make his figures lose substance, to become transparent and indeterminate one from the other, to defy gravity, to be present but intangible, to glow without a definable surface, not to be reduced to objects’
Essay 5 - Berger describes the work of William Blake who deliberately sought to give his work fluidity and a vagueness that suggested the subjects were more spiritual beings than tangible and most importantly ownable.
‘The oil painting showed what its owner was already enjoying among his possessions and his way of life. It consolidated his own sense of his own value. It enhanced his view of himself as he already was. It began with facts, the facts of his life. The paintings embellished the interior in which he actually lived.’
‘The purpose of publicity is the make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life. Not with the way of life of society, but with his own within it. It suggests that if he buys what it is offering, his life will become better. It offers him an improved alternative to what he is.’
Essay 7 Reading this as someone who makes commercial images, I found myself wondering when does an image go from inspiring to suggesting that the purveyor is incomplete without what it’s selling?
