In a few sentences, Berger’s negotiation of the social politics of images of women, and particularly the images women create of themselves, anticipated our cultural and media obsession with the selfie. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. Thus she turns herself into an object-and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.” In it, Berger argues that a woman “is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.
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However, that isn’t the crux of its appeal in 2020 by far the most quoted and publicly beloved essay in the book concerns the treatment and implications of the female nude in European oil painting.įor the uninitiated, that probably doesn’t mean very much, but this essay has taken on new meaning for a generation of women who have come of age with the Internet and image-driven social media platforms like Instagram.
#QUOTES FROM JOHN BERGER WAYS OF SEEING SERIES#
A lifelong Marxist who spent the majority of his later years in France, the adulation expressed by the British press and the social media accounts of teenage feminists alike would seem surprising, were it not for the enduring appeal of Berger’s most famous work, Ways of Seeing.Īn essay collection compiled following his 1972 BBC television series of the same name, Ways of Seeing has become a mainstay of University art courses and has even been credited with changing the way a generation of Britons looked at art. When art critic, novelist, and essayist John Berger passed away at age 90 in January 2017, there followed the kind of outpouring of digital love usually reserved for national treasures of the late afternoon TV variety.
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“Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors reminding them of how they look or how they should look.