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Essay / The relevance of John Berger's ways of seeing today
John Berger is a novelist, poet, art critic and painter. His essay “Ways of Seeing” is widely known to renowned artists and university students. When first published in 1972 after his BBC broadcast, he shocked people with his views on viewing and understanding art; but is Ways of Seeing still useful and readable today? In my opinion, yes, because he uses his platform to speak about the injustices and civilization that were happening at the time, he changes the regulated ways of thinking, and most of his statements or ideas are still accurate and can be applied to the human brain today. He shares his political views on capitalism and Western society as well as some Marxist ideology and even uses his platform to speak about inequality and justice – comparing two images of women several times in his book, he stated that the women are considered objects. but went on to point out the hypocrisy of our world: “You painted a naked woman because you liked to look at her,” Berger wrote, “Put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nudity you had depicted for your own pleasure. It was quite evident in the text that he was a supporter and had sympathy for the women's movement, interviewing an all-female cast and discussing issues such as empowerment. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get the original essay I agree that Berger is a liberator of images – he makes me look at images and paintings in different ways that I hadn't seen. seen before; and it's refreshing to see new things in an old work of art; but although it appealed to many people in the 1970s with its interesting point of view and takes, the author's overall approach to the book is almost ostentatious due to its confident tone and general statements about everything I know... while that may be the case, I think it deals with art and images, it takes into account both and the factors of emotion, location, perspective, relationships, stories, etc. One of Berger's arguments about ways of seeing is that images all contain more than what appears on the surface. He proves this through the images in the text and makes us question every image we see. Throughout the text, Berger lists the ways in which images can be “unpacked” to reveal their true meaning. My own understanding of art in relation to images is that images require a certain narrative and a certain language, and our language with the camera has radically changed our relationship with famous works of art, separating the masters out of their context and mass producing them: “By creating the transmissible work of art, the camera has multiplied its possible meanings and destroyed its unique original meaning. This seems even more present in our culture, where everyone with a phone is a photographer and digital images constitute not only social networks and digital maps, but also advertising and surveillance. Berger explains how the goddesses of art became the models of advertising; Advertising tells us that buying a product will transform us by showing pictures of those who have already been transformed by it – these are people we should aspire to. The image of an underwear model is desired by men and envied by women. Besides the truth about this,.