John Berger opens his seminal Ways of Seeing with an observation that seems counterintuitive, considering its status as a written text: that, as we inhabit the world, we constantly perceive it, only later naming the things we see, making language insufficient for conveying the way we see the world. One way that people can recreate their way of perceiving the world is through images. This term is used to describe paintings, photographs, films, or any other representation that humans can construct, and it is assumed that every image externalizes its creator's way of seeing. Another way of phrasing this: all images are encoded with ideology, regardless of whether their creators consciously want them to be. From this premise, Berger explains how images have layers of deeper meaning beyond what they show on the surface: they can offer a valuable document of how their creator saw the world, but their underlying politics can also be obscured or mystified in order to uphold the powers that be. Throughout the first essay in the book, Berger draws heavily on the work of Walter Benjamin to explain how reproduction is one possible way to change the meaning of images. Drawing on Benjamin, Berger argues that reproductions impact images by bringing them into new contexts, opening up new (and often, more democratic) possibilities for their interpretation. This is the core tenet of the first essay: reproduction changes what images mean by circulating them in new ways and alongside new ideas, breaking down the rarified narratives handed down from the elite that often seek to stabilize our understanding of their meanings.
The second essay in the book is all in images—text appears only sporadically to attribute paintings, and not all the images are attributed. They share a common subject matter: women. Throughout the essay, women appear in paintings and photographs, across an apparently diverse range of settings and times: photos of contemporary women at work, oil paintings of women in the nude, and advertisements of women selling products are all reproduced side-by-side in this essay. Berger never explicitly notes the connections between these images, leaving their relationship open-ended.
Chapter 3 helps elucidate the relationships between the previous essay's images of women. Berger begins the chapter by observing how, both in images and in society at large, men and women are represented differently: men have agency, whereas women are mostly engaged in a constant project of monitoring their self-presentation rather than focusing on external tasks. He simplifies this by writing, famously, that "men act while women appear." This relationship, he points out, is especially perceptible in a certain tradition of European oil painting, which often depicts nude female figures. The women in these paintings aren't typically nude because it makes sense for the narratives in which they're depicted; rather, their nudity is constituted by and for the (presumably) male spectator. Women are painted to self-consciously exhibit their sexuality, accused of vanity by the association with symbols like mirrors and beauty tools, yet they were rarely the ones behind this representational tradition. Rather, women appeared nude for the gratification of the paintings' owners, who were, for most of history, their primary spectators. Although images proliferate more widely now, certain aspects of this representational tradition remain, depicting women as passive or existing for male pleasure while men enjoy a more diverse multitude of representations. Berger points out that this entire system of gender relations is founded on a huge instance of hypocrisy: it presumes that the (male) spectator is a subjective individual, while denying the (female) subject any individual agency. This hypocrisy can still be seen in representations of women across media today, reinforcing just how prescient Berger's Marxist-feminist analysis was, even over four decades ago.
Chapter 4 is another image-only essay. Unlike Chapter 3, where all the images were related by their common subject matter, the images in Chapter 4 don't seem to be related in content. Rather, a perceptive viewer might notice that they are all oil paintings or photographs with oil paintings in them. Once again, the point being made here is effectively left open to the spectator. A handful of possible connections between the images emerge--for example, oil painting is often associated with wealth and excess across many of these images--but none is advocated for certain.
Following the pattern of Chapters 2 and 3, Chapter 5 adds some new context that can help us understand the unexplained images in Chapter 4. The essay focuses on a specific European tradition of oil painting, spanning roughly between 1500 and 1900. Within this tradition, Berger argues, the medium's capacity to paint objects extremely realistically and tactilely upholds the logic of market capitalism, where to possess things is the ultimate goal. Because objects rendered in oil painting are so deep and lustrous, they elicit a certain desire to touch—and, by extension, to possess—their subject matter. By Berger's assessment, only a handful of masterful oil painters from the period could escape this tradition; your average oil painting from the time functions as a simple demonstration of what money can buy, glorifying wealth and thus upholding the power of the ruling class that could afford to commission these paintings. It takes an immense effort and a lifetime of training to ascend to the status of a master who, like Rembrandt, distances oneself from this pattern, painting oil paintings with deeper meaning than just the glorification of material possession.
Chapter 6 is another image-only essay, the final one in the book. Its images are even more diverse than the first two, and they don't share an obvious connection in terms of subject matter or medium. Among them, we see images referencing colonial conquest, oil-painted portraits of wealthy subjects, pictures of domestic scenes, historical paintings, and photographs of children. This chapter, with its lack of obvious structuring logic, encourages us to flex our image-reading skills as encouraged by Berger in Chapter 1, imagining the possible relationship between these seemingly disparate photos. No definite answers emerge—this is truly a free-for-all that you've just got to look at yourself, hazarding a guess as to what these images might mean, comforted by the fact that there's really no right answer.
Finally in Chapter 7, Berger departs from his analysis of art history to deal with a strictly contemporary phenomenon: the advertisement, or "publicity image," as he calls it. Even at the time of his writing nearly fifty years ago, images had begun to proliferate more than ever, with advertisements accosting us around every turn. How do these advertisements work? According to Berger, they manufacture glamour by making viewers envy the hypothetical future versions of themselves that will become reality if they choose to buy a product. Herein lies the faulty logic of consumer choice that often justifies advertisements: they posit that customers have a choice between which products to buy, but making the choice not to buy seems unthinkable. In their glorification of material property, ads work in the same tradition as oil paintings, celebrating the private ownership of objects. Crucially, however, oil paintings were owned and seen by the ruling class for most of art history, whereas advertisements surround everyone today. This explains the largest difference in their functions: oil paintings reinforce the value of their owners' preexisting wealth, while advertisements appeal to a spectator who is likely both a worker and a buyer, upholding the system of market capitalism even more profoundly. They operate by making viewers dissatisfied with their life as it is, suggesting that this dissatisfaction will evaporate as soon as they buy the product on view. Through this analysis, Berger unpacks the source of publicity images' power, elucidating one contemporary site in which the question of images' underlying ideology persists.
