Ways of Seeing Literary Elements

Non-Fiction

1970s Britain; The history of oil painting, 1500-1900

Adapted from a TV series starring Berger himself, Ways of Seeing is narrated by the author. It is mostly narrated in the third person, but occasionally addresses the reader directly in the second person.

Intellectual but approachable and occasionally sarcastic; playfully polemical.

"The viewer" or "the spectator" is the closest thing this book has to a protagonist, as it revolves around the ways that viewers read and relate to images. There's no exact antagonist, but rather, a number of antagonistic forces: capitalism, private property, the historical elite who seek to obfuscate art history, and those who advocate reductive, surface-level interpretations of artworks.

Given the text's Marxist leanings, Berger's discussion of art history focuses heavily on the tension between the wealthy, powerful elite vs. the mass, everyman, or proletariat. This could also be interpreted as the conflict between image-makers (typically those in power) vs. image-viewers (the everyday citizen).

Berger alludes throughout the text to Kenneth Clark's Civilization, another BBC miniseries released shortly before Ways of Seeing. Civilization endorses a more conservative approach to art history, suggesting that meaning is intrinsic to an artwork and may only be uncovered by a spectator who does enough work to understand the work on its own terms. Berger refers back to this position frequently, arguing that a more relational understanding of how images work enables a radical new understanding of art history.

-Paintings in the tradition of "the female nude" rely on the belief in individual subjectivity by presupposing that the viewer is a subjective individual, yet they deny the women they depict precisely this kind of subjectivity.

-Advertisements confront us at a specific moment in time, but paradoxically, only work if they refer to the future or the past: they cannot speak of the present, as they rely on an ability to make us either nostalgic for an imagined past or envious of an imagined future.

The relational form of art appreciation that Berger endorses necessitates a personification of the painting or image itself: the work's meaning arises from an "interaction" between image and viewer, even though the image is an inanimate object. The idea that a relationship exists between a painting's subjects and viewer personifies the work, seemingly bringing it to life.