Ways of Seeing Summary and Analysis of Chapter 1

Summary

When we inhabit the world, we are constantly seeing. Perception is an ongoing reality—we are
always taking in the world, and only after the fact do we name it. Thus begins Ways of Seeing,
drawing our attention to the fraught relationship between vision, images, words, and meaning.
Our understanding of what we see doesn't generally align with the objective facts of what we're
seeing: for example, we see the sun set every night, while we know that it isn't really "setting,"
but rather, the earth is simply revolving away from it. Likewise, we can attempt to capture what
we see, reproducing or recreating it for others so that they can try to understand how we perceive
the world. To do so is to create an image: "an image is a sight which has been recreated or
reproduced." In so doing, we remove the image from the original circumstances under which it
was seen. In this sense, every image embodies what Berger calls "a way of seeing": a record of
how its creator saw the world. Images can preserve things as they once were, and simultaneously,
preserve how their creator once saw their subject. Images, more so than any other relics from the
past, offer a direct testimony as to how people saw—and, by extension, understood—the world.

This testimonial value makes images extremely powerful. But often, the image's revelation of a
"way of seeing" is overshadowed by a series of assumptions that we are taught to make when
appraising a piece of art. Art history often deals with the "form," "status," "truth," or "beauty"
that trained art historians assign to a painting, but Berger argues that these assumptions no longer
accord with the world as it now exists. Rather, they serve to distance us from the power of
historical artworks, sanitizing them in a sweeping act of "cultural mystification" that upholds the
values of those in power. Later in the chapter, he offers an alternative metric by which images
could more productively be understood. But for now, he pauses to consider an example: in an
authoritative text on the Dutch painter Frans Hals, a learned art historian discourages readers
from interpreting the powerful facial expressions and potentially unflattering characterizations
assigned to the painting's subjects, urging them instead to consider the painting's "compositional
unity" and drowning the work in historical context. To Berger, this interpretation forecloses
meaningful exploration of the painting's value, discouraging viewers from engaging with it on
their own terms, and, in so doing, stopping them from questioning the capitalist values that,
Berger argues, underpin the work.

Several other art historical conventions are so entrenched that their political and ideological
consequences are often ignored. One such convention is perspective, which centers the entire
world of a painting on the eye of the spectator, reinforcing a narrative of individualism and
Cartesian subjectivity ("I think, therefore, I am"). Perspective fell out of style with the advent of
the camera, which made it evident that the passage of time is fundamental to our experience of
the visual. As cameras changed and evolved, eventually producing the movie camera, our
understanding of the visible also changed: for example, paintings that were once sequestered in a
specific location, such as inside a church, could suddenly be photographed and videotaped and
infinitely reproduced, severed from the unique singularity of their original location. The
painting's meaning, which was once fixed by the stability of its location, suddenly becomes
changeable.

This freeing up of a painting's value due to reproduction has immense revolutionary potential, if
used wisely. But it can also continue to uphold the powers that be. Once a painting is reproduced,
the meaning of the original shifts: it becomes the original of a reproduction, whose value is
affirmed by its rarity. Thus, the original version of a painting that has been reproduced widely
attains a kind of cult value, which Berger calls "entirely bogus": this cult value is the final
desperate attempt on the part of the ruling class to justify the values that underpin their
domination, falsely declaring the art object mysteriously unique and exclusive in an era when
mass reproduction has made uniqueness appear impossible. A handful of charts illustrate that this
narrative is especially believed by the working class, who associate art museums with churches,
worshipping the mystery of unaccountable wealth and value. To Berger's mind, this pattern ought
to be reversed by encouraging the proletariat to seize the "means of reproduction."

Importantly, when images are reproduced, their meaning often changes. Often, reproductions are
cropped, edited, or shown out of context, allowing them to be mobilized in the service of an
argument unrelated to their original meaning. This takes place everywhere from art history
textbooks to advertisements, forcing us to question how an image's context inevitably impacts
our understanding of it. But, on the flip side, this also means that we—and here Berger means the
left or those aligned against the ruling classes—can change an image's meaning by reproducing it
under more favorable circumstances. Here, Berger finally offers us a more productive metric to
judge whether we like an artwork: whether it resonates with us personally, not as a nostalgic
document of the past or rarefied historical relic, but as a powerful composition that strikes us
when we see it in the present. He illustrates this using the example of a bulletin board where
someone might pin images that are meaningful to them—it is this kind of casual approach to
appraising an image's value that Berger advocates, viewing it as the antidote to an art historical
tradition that encourages us to view paintings with distanced contemplation or awe at their
historical (and, by extension, financial) value. In this age of reproduction, original paintings gain
a new value as the "silent," "still" counterparts to reproducible images: they bear the trace of the
painter, allowing past and present to converge. This power doesn't diminish when paintings are
reproduced—rather, it depends on the viewer's preexisting familiarity with the image, which is
made possible by its widespread reproduction.

By approaching artworks in this way, we can question the role of paintings from the past,
destabilizing the predominant historical narrative that they are solely the territory of the wealthy,
educated elite. While art has, for most of history, existed at a certain remove from everyday life,
the advent of mass reproduction wears away at this rarefied designation, allowing more people to
enjoy more art more frequently. But this possibility isn't often taken advantage of, because the
ruling class has managed to uphold the popular belief that art can only be understood or
appreciated by the elite. Berger urges us to consider a "new language of images" in which
anyone can forge a meaningful relationship to the past by engaging with art. Herein lies the
political urgency of understanding art history: understanding this "language of images" prevents
us from being cut off from the past, enabling us to become "active agents" in our understanding
of history, and thus give meaning to our lives.

Analysis

Ways of Seeing opens with an observation that is somewhat paradoxical for a written text:
"Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak." Indeed, in the
opening line of his text, Berger acknowledges the insufficiency of written language itself, noting
that vision is continuous and immediate, while the words that we use to name what we see can
only be conjured after the fact. Seeing, he explains, "establishes our place in the surrounding
world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are
surrounded by it." Because of this disconnect, our knowledge of how the world works never
quite fits what we see of it: for example, we see the sun set every night, and we know that this is
because the Earth is rotating away from it, but this explanation is not fully consistent with what
we can see. As another example, Berger points out Rene Magritte's painting The Key of Dreams,
which depicts four objects labelled as other objects: a horse, a clock, a pitcher, and a suitcase are
designated as "the door, the wind, the bird, and the valise" respectively. Only the final item
matches up with its label (valise is French for suitcase), gesturing towards the gap between how
we name items and how we understand their meaning.

But before he can dive head-on into the complicated nuances of linguistics, Berger observes:
"this seeing which comes before words, and can never be quite covered by them, is not a
question of mechanically reacting to stimuli." Sure, certain sights—the sight of one's lover, for
instance—conjure intense emotions that can't quite be described, this doesn't mean that vision is
solely a machine-like way of eliciting emotional responses to what we see in the world. Vision is
continuous, and to see something implies that, conversely, we can be seen from (or even by) that
thing. Vision is reciprocal, and when we discuss what we see with others, we are attempting to
vivify the way that we see the world or understand the way that someone else does. In this sense,
there is no single vision of the world—or, as Berger puts it, "way of seeing." Instead, there are a
multiplicity of "ways of seeing," as many ways of visualizing and then verbalizing the world as
there are people in it.

One way that we can try to describe our particular way of seeing to others is through images:
"An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced." Detached from the original
conditions under which it was first seen, an image constitutes an attempt on the part of its maker
to share the way that they saw a particular moment or event. With this in mind, Berger offers one
of his most famous propositions: "Every image embodies a way of seeing." While we may want
to believe that images offer objective records of the world, every single one—including
photographs, which are typically assumed to be objective mechanical records—reflects its
maker's "way of seeing." When a photographer decides what to include in the frame before they
snap a photograph, they're transmitting their way of seeing; the same is true of a painter who,
consciously or not, emphasizes certain features of their subject as they apply paint to the canvas.
Likewise, when we view images, our understanding of them is impacted by our own way of
seeing. For example, when we see a photograph with multiple subjects, our eyes may be drawn
to one in particular (again, a lover, for example)—not because they were emphasized by the
photographer in any particular way, but because they were known or special to us already.

Berger explains that images' power resides in the fact that they can outlast what they represent:
they depict people as young long after they have aged and died, or landscapes even after they
have changed. But because all images embody a certain way of seeing, images don't just index
how their subjects once looked: they represent how their subjects once looked to the people who
made the images. This fact was recognized as early as the Renaissance, when philosophy turned
towards recognizing individuality. As a result, Berger contends that "images are more precise
and richer than literature": not because literature is not a valuable historical document, but
simply because images all implicitly transmit their maker's understanding of the visible.

The way that we look at an image can determine our understanding of it just as strongly as the
views of the artist that are encoded within it, Berger continues. When we look at a painting, for
example, our impression is determined by a whole host of assumptions we have learned to make
about art's value, causing us to like (or dislike) it based on our inherited beliefs about its beauty,
form, status, claim to "truth," etc. According to Berger, these assumptions aren't useful, as they
simply obscure the past. He doesn't offer a preferable metric quite yet, but does propose that
"history" is constituted by the relation between the present and the past, and that relation is
mystified by an art-historical tradition that makes artworks unnecessarily remote. When we look
unquestioningly at the art of the past, we fall privy to a constructed history that justifies the role
of the ruling class—precisely because the ruling class determines the dominant narrative of art
history.

With this in mind, Berger turns to an example: a seminal volume on the seventeenth-century
Dutch painter Frans Hals. Nearing the end of his life, an impoverished Hals was granted peat on
public charity, preventing him from freezing to death during the winter. In the last two paintings
he ever made, Hals was commissioned to portray the Governors and Governesses of the Alms
House that gave him the peat, recognizing the administrators of his charity. The author of the
book on Hals writes about the paintings in a way that explicitly conveys his own bias: he claims
that Hals did not paint the Governors or Governesses in the spirit of bitterness, reading the
painting's composition as the source of its emotional charge. While these interpretations are as
logical as any, Berger points out that "very little is known about Hals or the Regents who
commissioned him," encouraging us to look at the paintings and interpret, for ourselves, how
Hals saw his subjects. The author of the book on Hals, who Berger refers to generically as "the
art historian" in order to draw our attention to how widespread his beliefs are, discourages this
kind of direct judgement. Berger, on the other hand, draws our attention to aspects of the painting
that could be understood as confrontational, urging us to reconsider the art historian's sanitized
assessment of where the painting's emotional heft lies. In obscuring these features, the art
historian has mystified the past, downplaying the drama of Hals' story, explaining away the
impressions that might otherwise be evident to the viewer. Why does this particular example
matter? Well, according to Berger, "Hals was the first portraitist to paint the new characters and
expressions created by capitalism." By the art historian's dry, formal assessment, such a
conclusion might never have been reached. Thus, Berger explains, our dependence on the
inherited narratives of art history only serves to rewrite the past in favor of those in power.

He then briefly detours into explaining the convention of perspective. Established during the
Renaissance, perspective creates the illusion of three-dimensional space by centering the image
on the eye of a hypothetical beholder, depicting the world as though it recedes into a specific
point on the horizon. It is implied by this convention that perspective is the most "realistic" form
of painting, but Berger contests this, critiquing the fact that in a perspectival work, "the visible
world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God."
Paradoxically, perspective is addressed to a single spectator who can only be in one place at one
time—not very godlike at all. The shortcomings of perspective became gradually apparent
following the invention of the camera: the camera isolated experience into a single moment by
photographing it, showing that our lived experience of the visible is inextricable from the lapsing
of time. What you see is as dependent on your position in time as on your position in space.
Resultantly, it became impossible to imagine a world where everything visible converges to the
spectator's eye at a single point. This became especially evident with the advent of the movie
camera, which demonstrated that "there was no centre." Following this discovery, "the visible
came to mean something different."

How, exactly, did the advent of the camera change our understanding of the visible? Berger
continues to explain that, originally, paintings were integral to the place where they resided, such
as the interior of a church. In this sense, a painting's uniqueness derived from the uniqueness of
the place where it was on view. Sure, paintings could be moved—but at the end of the day, they
could only be seen in one place at one time. When a camera reproduces a painting by
photographing it, Berger writes, it destroys the painting's uniqueness. While this may sound
detrimental, Berger actually sees it as positive: it opens the door to a multiplicity of meanings
and understandings, and allows the painting to be seen and enjoyed by a wider and more diverse
crowd of people. Here (and throughout the chapter), he draws heavily on the work of Frankfurt
School critical theorist Walter Benjamin. In his 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of its
Mechanical Reproducibility, Benjamin posits that mass reproduction severs artworks from their
"aura," the abstract sense of rarified wonder attached to an absolutely unique work of art. In the
absence of the aura, a work can meet the viewer halfway, opening itself up to a plurality of
diverse interpretations.

It's important to note, however, that reproductions also distort the meaning of the original. Berger
offers the example of the Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci, a widely reproduced (and, by
extension, widely recognized) painting. Whenever one views the original, which hangs at the
National Gallery, they will inevitably regard it differently than had it not been reproduced: they
will see it as the original of a reproduction. This privileged status of originality becomes the
source of a quasi-religious value—a religiosity that Berger calls "entirely bogus," as it is a
market value premised on a religious value that the market precisely cannot admit. Berger
observes that a viewer who visits the original painting will likely be struck more profoundly by
its status as a unique original than by any of the painting's actual details. Similarly, he offers the
example of The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist, a painting that was
relatively unknown until it sold to an American buyer for 2.5 million British pounds (mind you,
this was written in the 1970s, so due to inflation, that price would be even higher now). After
receiving this high market valuation, the painting was placed in a chapel-like room of its own,
behind bulletproof glass. Visitors are impressed not by the meaning of its image, but by of its
market value. This sense of economically-informed bogus religiosity, according to Berger,
replaces what paintings lost when they became reproducible: in a vain attempt to maintain the
status of a unique original (an attempt that Berger notes is underwritten by "oligarchic,
undemocratic" values), this mystifying semi-spiritual sense of originality that characterizes the
experience of viewing a valuable painting has been manufactured.

Berger then offers us some charts, which show that the majority of the population believes that
art museums "are full of holy relics which refer to a mystery which excludes them." To the
majority of people across the social classes, art galleries resemble churches, with some highly
educated individuals likening them to lecture halls. In either case, the meanings of the paintings
that hang in these museums no longer resides within the paintings themselves—they have
become translated into information. He then notes that reproduction often involves changing an
image, whether through cropping it or shifting its context. One such example takes place when
paintings are reproduced within films: the durational dimension of a film allows the painting to
be analyzed in time, focusing on certain details in a specific order. When this happens, the
painting inevitably becomes part of the filmmaker's particular narrative. On the other hand, when
a painting is seen in person, the viewer has the freedom to examine each element in his own
time, perhaps revisiting parts or changing his mind. In this sense, the painting "maintains its own
authority" when viewed statically and in-person. Reproductions also change the meanings of
paintings by placing them alongside words. Berger reproduces an image of Van Gogh's
Wheatfield with Crows. On the next page, the painting is reproduced again, alongside the
caption: "This is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself." It's hard to
define precisely how this caption changes the image, but it's clear that it does.

With all this in mind, Berger makes the argument that reproduced images easily become
mobilized to make arguments that are unrelated to their original or independent meaning.
Because works of art are reproducible, they can easily be placed into new contexts, their
meaning changing based on the text or other images that accompany them. Theoretically, this
offers great revolutionary potential—but as Berger notes, artworks are most often reproduced in
contexts that uphold existing hierarchies. Here, he inserts two illustrations of paintings being
used in advertisements, exemplifying his point. "The means of reproduction," he writes, "are
used politically and commercially to disguise or deny what their existence makes possible."
Essentially, this is to say that, while mass reproducibility ought to make images more proletarian,
it's generally only those already in power who successfully cash in (often literally) on the
possibility of reproducing images for ideological ends.

So how can everyday citizens benefit from the capacity to reproduce images? Berger offers the
example of pinboards where people often collect images, letters, newspaper clippings, and
postcards that they've amassed according to their personal investment in them. "Logically," says
Berger, "these boards should replace museums." By this, he seems to say that we ought to
approach original works of art for their sentimental value, or whatever other qualities we're
naturally drawn to in them, not necessarily for their presumed value, whether economic or
quasi-religious. However, this is certainly not to say that original works of art are useless or
museums should be destroyed: to Berger, the value of an original work lies in its silence and
stillness: hanging on the wall of a gallery, an original painting is never just pure information: it
bears the trace of the artist who created it, however long ago, closing a gap between the past and
present whenever we regard the artist's handiwork. This relationship between the past and
present is made richer by how we have previously experienced a painting's reproductions, not
diminished by it. In this sense, to appreciate an image enough to add it to our hypothetical
pinboard is to experience its full meaning.

To end the chapter, Berger poses a prescient question: "To whom does the meaning of the art of
the past properly belong?" He encourages us to take hold of the art historical narrative by
appreciating art by applying it to our own lives, evaluating it on this basis rather than by some
abstract metric such as its "realism" or "beauty." For most of art history, visual art has been a
rarified realm, distancing it from everyday life and aligning it with those in power. To Berger, the
capacity for mass reproduction is, for the first time, challenging this preserve: images now
surround us "in the same way as a language surrounds us," freed into the mainstream of everyday
life. The only remaining problem, then, is that not enough people understand how to read and
mobilize images for their own means—a problem that Berger attempts to begin solving by
bringing our attention to it over the course of this chapter.

Ways of Seeing Summary and Analysis of Chapter 2

Summary

The second chapter of Ways of Seeing is made up entirely of images. Women are central to each
image in this chapter.

The first is a photograph of a woman at work in what appears to be a photo studio. She focuses
on her work, looking away from the camera, while three large photos of women—apparently
advertisements or magazine editorials—rest on the wall behind her. Next comes a woman seated
in the backseat of a luxurious car, eyes closed, clutching an expensive-looking purse as
spectators stare into the car window looking confused and excited. On the opposite page is a
photo of two figures; it's unclear whether they're women or mannequins. Both have glamorous
hairdos, and a male figure is visible in the background, where he appears to be building
something. Below that, a photo from a magazine is reprinted, depicting a woman in an evening
gown on the red carpet as three men stare at her approvingly.

On the following page, five images are collaged, comparing various representations of female
nudes from across art history: a Giacometti sculpture, an erotic-looking photograph, and an
Impressionist painting are all all juxtaposed against one another. On the opposite page, a single
painting is centered mid-page: the Rembrandt painting Bathsheba, depicting a nude woman with
a servant crouching at her foot.

The next spread is a collage of advertising photos, punctuated on the far right-hand side by a still
life of a table set for a banquet. In each of the advertisements, a fragment of a woman's body is
shown, as a knee, a mouth, a breast, or a buttock appears before the camera, zoomed-in and
aggressively cropped. Only one image depicts a woman with a visible face; it's partially obscured
by her upturned arm as she pulls her shirt over her head as if midway through removing it.

The following page shows a photo of a crowded escalator packed with smartly-dressed
commuters, an advertisement for shapewear where a long-haired woman is seen from behind as
she poses in front of a mirror, and a photograph taken over a woman's shoulder as she applies
makeup in a tabletop mirror. Across from these, two images dominate the following page.
Judgment of Paris by Peter Paul Rubens takes up most of the page, depicting three naked women
(centered among them, Helen of Troy), vying for the designation of "most beautiful" as a cloud
of cherubs presides over them; below, a woman is seen from behind, perched seductively on a
chair, looking into a sea of cameras.

Analysis

This is one of three chapters in Ways of Seeing that contains no text, only images. Berger refers
to these chapters in the introduction as "essays," illustrating his point that images, when selected
and arranged in a certain order, can constitute an argument on their own, even without the aid of
words. Although he notes in the same introduction that the chapters of the book can be read in
any order, this photo essay comes directly before a chapter where he writes about the female
nude in art history, setting the stage for his future analysis should the viewer choose to read them
in order. Because there are no words, this essay is highly open to subjective interpretation—no
analysis of its content should be considered definitive; rather, it's just one possible way of
reading the argument that Berger has constructed through these images.

The first spread in this chapter depicts two people in what appears to be the process of
image-making: a woman in a photo studio, and a man, engaged in a task we can't see, framed
behind two mannequins. It's not quite clear what either one is doing, but the viewer might infer
from their surroundings that they are at work as photographers or designers. Below each of these
images, a second photo resides. Both of the bottom photos depict situations that radiate glamour:
a woman in the backseat of a car wearing an elegant dress and purse, with viewers peeking in the
car window, and, on the other page, another woman, hair similarly coiffed, photographed on the
red carpet for a magazine editorial. In both of the bottom photos, the women are being watched:
by the pedestrians outside the car in the first, and by three men on the red carpet in the second.
Considered together, these elements stage several of the questions that Berger has hinted at in the
last chapter: how are images produced? How do the conditions of their production impact the
"ways of seeing" that are implicit within them? Recalling Chapter 1, a reader might question how
the subjects of the top two photographs—the image-makers—are responsible for shaping the
ideological regimes of the bottom photographs, which depict highly stylized women being
looked at. The presence of women foreshadows the upcoming chapter, where Berger will
elaborate on his famous statement that, often in art, "men act" while "women appear." However,
this is complicated by the fact that the image-maker on the left-hand page is a woman: is she
actively participating in a regime of visual conventions that, as Berger will later explain, often
oppresses women? Or rather, has she wrested the power and created oppositional work, shaped
by her own more radical way of seeing? These are questions that we can never answer, due to the
nature of these photographs: they are deliberately withholding, never giving us enough
information to reach any definitive conclusions about how to interpret them.

The following spread depicts a collage of various female nudes. These vary substantially: some,
like the Giacometti statue, are hardly recognizable as women; others, like the two photographs
(which, unlike the famous artworks, aren't attributed or named in the index), appear to have been
made for the purpose of erotic appeal. There are six images on the left page, collaged tightly,
calling attention to the differences between them. One might question how each of the different
representational approaches employed in each of these paintings speaks to their artist's view of
the world—especially, perhaps, how they saw and engaged with women. This calls us back to
Berger's assertion in Chapter 1 that painting is an especially valuable historical document
because it immortalizes the way the world existed as seen by a given artist at a given time. On
the opposite page, there is only one painting: Bathsheba by Rembrandt. This painting depicts
Bathsheba, a biblical figure who was so beautiful that King David sent her husband to perish at
war in order to have an affair with her. But why does she get the whole page to herself, while six
images, some depicting women who come closer to today's conventional beauty standards, are
squeezed into the page opposite it? Perhaps this means to draw attention to the arbitrary and
constructed nature of beauty standards altogether, reminding us that the features that have
historically been considered "beautiful" constantly change. Interestingly, all of the artworks that
are accredited in this spread were made by men: Picasso, Gaugin, Modigliani, Giacometti, and
Rembrandt. However, no other generalizations can really be made to unite the images, aside
from pointing out that they're all nude. It's not as though all the images are uniformly sexualized,
or necessarily degrading—many are intriguing, flattering, or creative representations. Indeed,
Berger's argument is far more complex than simply suggesting that images of nude women are
misogynistic—but exactly how this is the case, he won't reveal until the following essay.

Next is a spread of advertisements. In all of these images, women's bodies are shown in
fragments, but never in whole. Here, Berger seems to propose a connection between chapters 3
and 7, which deal with female representation and advertising images respectively. In each of
these images, a female body part, severed from the whole, is employed to make a product look
desirable, whether it's a tongue reaching out to a popsicle (advertising lipstick) or an exposed
breast and delicate hand selling spray-on deodorant. All of these images are united by the fact
that they exploit the attention-grabbing qualities of female sexuality in order to sell a product,
drawing attention to the interrelated systems of capitalism and misogyny. If, as Berger suggests
in Chapter 1, all images are documents of the ideological conditions under which they were
created, then these advertisements index a culture of misogyny and exploitation. Interestingly, a
couple of images on this page don't contain female subjects—they show decadent arrangements
of food on tables set for banquets. One appears to be a photo from a cooking magazine, one an
oil painting, and one an unattributed photograph of a large quantity of meat on a table. The
connection between these images and the highly sexualized advertisements is left open-ended.
One possible reading might be that these advertisements figure the female body itself as
something appealing to be consumed, not unlike the mouth-watering displays of food on the
tables.

The next spread presents an even more obscure collection of images. On the far left, a woman is
shown nearly nude from behind as she gazes into a mirror, her long blonde hair cascading down
her back. Her face is not visible in the reflection; her folded arms cover her ostensibly naked
chest. Text in the lower right corner suggests that this is an advertisement: "Next to myself I like
Vedo." Vedo would seem to be the brand of pantyhose the woman wears--but this is one of the
last things about the image to strike the viewer. On the top right of that page, a group of people in
businesslike dress are packed onto escalators that appear to be in a metro station (it looks like a
stop on the London Tube, but since Berger doesn't credit this image in the index, we can't know
for sure). Below that, a woman is seen from over the shoulder as she applies makeup in a mirror,
her face visible only as a reflection. The opposite page contains a Rubens painting centering on
three nude women, and a photograph of a busty woman, head turned away from the camera,
facing into a sea of other cameras. Her identity is unclear; the pose suggests Marilyn Monroe, but
again, without additional context, it's hard to know. Much more so than the previous spreads in
this chapter, these images seem unrelated. One might note that several deal with how women
present themselves: in three of these images, the female subjects are turned away from the
viewer, addressing another subject—the media or their own reflection. In the Rubens painting,
the central figure, Helen of Troy, receives an apple from Paris, christening her the most beautiful
woman in the world. The arrangement of the painting suggests the three nude female subjects to
be in conversation with two men, also in the nude. One woman is turned away from the viewer,
though it's unclear who she addresses—perhaps an ominous-looking figure in the upper-left-hand
corner, or maybe a cloud full of cherubim that hovers above them. However, the image with the
escalators lacks any features that appear to relate it to the others on this spread. Thus, the
connection can only be speculated: it could be read as a metaphor for metropolitan life, which is
pervaded by the precise kind of capitalism that produces publicity images such as those seen on
this page and the previous spread. It could also be understood as a "realistic" depiction of
women, nearly indistinguishable from the men in the picture, although the previous chapter
cautions us against employing "realism" as a metric to judge images because no photograph is
ever an objective document.

Ways of Seeing Summary and Analysis of Chapter 3

Summary

In both life and art, social convention dictates that men and women are perceived differently:
men project a capacity for power that reaches outside of their own body, whereas women's entire
being is thought to reside in their physical appearance. As a result, women are forced to survey
themselves constantly, conscious of the fact that their tastes, values, and personalities will be
judged by male viewers on the grounds of their outward appearance. To simplify this, Berger
offers the following paradigm: "men act and women appear." While men do the looking, women
watch themselves being looked at.

This relationship is especially perceptible in a certain tradition of European oil painting that often
depicted nude female figures. From the earliest nude paintings, often featuring Adam and Eve, a
woman's nakedness was constituted by her relationship to the viewer: she either performs shame
and modesty, or exhibits herself proudly—but never exists as simply naked and unaware she is
being looked at. Even as nude oil painting grew more secular, female subjects continued to be
defined by their awareness of the spectator. Sometimes, as in Tinoretto's Sisannah and the
Elders, this is the subject of the painting: the woman looks at herself in a mirror, just as the
spectator looks at her in the painting. The theme of the work is the act of looking at a nude
woman. Paradoxically, mirrors in such paintings often symbolized women's vanity—allowing
painters to condemn the so-called "vanity" of female subjects that they painted in the nude for
the sake of their own pleasure. But the symbolic mirror nevertheless served to reinforce that
women should be treated (and treat themselves) primarily as sights to be regarded.

This belief carries over to later paintings like The Judgement of Paris, where Helen of Troy is
deemed the most beautiful woman in the world. The painting's subject is a competition between
women, vying to be recognized by a man as the most beautiful. But what prize do they win?
According to Berger, the prize is "to be owned"—i.e., to be immortalized in a painting which a
male owner will be able to enjoy. Thus, female nakedness in this tradition is never an expression
of the woman's own desires, but a submission to the spectator's. Berger briefly notes that this is
unique to European art; in several other cultures, sexuality is depicted through partnered couples
where both man and woman play an active role.

Berger distinguishes between "the nude" and simply "the naked": the nude is always
conventionalized, never a unique individual. To be nude is to be on display, while to be naked is
"to be oneself." In the standard European oil painting, the protagonist of a picture's narrative is
outside the painting itself: the spectator is the center of the action, and he is presumed to be a
man. The rest of the painting's action implicitly addresses him, whether by orienting figures
outwards so they face the viewer frontally or casting the subject's gaze towards the viewer rather
than the other characters in the painting. In this way, the conventions of nude painting make it
seem as though the figures have assumed their nudity for the sake of the viewer—a delusion of
power that reinforces the spectator's masculine sexuality. This habit continues into modern
imagery, which Berger illustrates by including a photo from a pornographic magazine alongside
Ingres' La Grande Odalisque. In both paintings, the central nude female figure looks at the
viewer with a self-conscious charm, exhibiting her femininity and sexual value voluntarily. The
nude painting, as opposed to simply the naked, is defined by a world where everything is
organized around the viewer's sexual pleasure.

Of course, exceptions to this tradition exist. Here, Berger discusses a few paintings of unclothed
women that are not "nude" but "naked." Sometimes, this is the case because the painter's own
love of his subject causes him to edge out the viewer, so that the spectator witnesses the love
between painter and subject rather than inserting himself into the fantasy. But painting nakedness
is tricky, because, despite all the frenzied appeal of looking at your lover naked in real life,
human bodies are ultimately kind of banal, and this banality can be chilling if rendered
unremarkably. There's something abject, even disturbing, about a painting of a naked body that's
realistic and specific but conveys no aura of mystery; thus, it's easier for artists to simply render
their figures as generic "nudes" onto which the viewer can project their own fantasies.

Berger does offer one example of an exceptional painting of nakedness: Rubens' Helene
Fourment in a Fur Coat. The artist paints his wife midway through turning around, as a fur has
been hastily pulled over her shoulders to cover her private areas. The image is frozen in time,
allowing the viewer to easily imagine a moment when the subject was fully naked such that these
moments coexist with the one that was captured in the actual painting. Certain parts of her body
are completely unrealistic; others, extremely so. She turns at an impossible angle, her torso
disconnected from her legs in an optical illusion enabled by the placement of the fur, yet her
flesh is rendered with intense care and attention to realism. To Berger, this image transcends the
limitations of the generalized (and typically marginalizing) nude, allowing the artist to capture
his lover in all her "extraordinary particularity."

He closes the chapter by pointing out how the system of gender relations encoded in most nude
painting is inherently contradictory: it relies on the spirit of individualism by appealing to a
subjective viewer, yet depicts women as objects or abstractions with no individual subjectivity.
While men were allowed to be active spectators, makers, and even owners of paintings, women
were relegated to displaying and surveying their own femininity. Finally, this tide has begun to
change, as it's increasingly common to question entrenched representational strategies—but the
values that underlie the tradition of the female nude are still expressed in other forms of media,
such that women still often appear passively for an idealized male spectator.

Analysis

Berger begins this chapter with an image of Reclining Bacchante by Trutat, a painting of a nude
woman reclining on leopard-print sheets as a man gazes at her through a window. Her body
angled away from the man, this woman meets the viewer's gaze, ignoring her counterpart and
instead gesturing towards the world outside the painting. He then describes how, according to
social convention, the presence of a woman is different from that of a man. Men's presence is
characterized by the way they embody power, Berger explains: men boast a striking presence if
they can dramatically and credibly promise power, whether this power is physical, sexual,
economic, or moral—but in any of these cases, the power is exterior to the man himself. His
entire way of being in the world is characterized by the promise—which may well be false—that
he can use this power to affect others. A woman's presence, on the other hand, is said to express
her own attitude about herself. Through the way that women style themselves—clothing, taste,
opinions, gestures—they are made legible to the world, leading to the assumption that some
intrinsic quality of their being can be read purely through physical signifiers.

Berger elaborates on how this distinction is disadvantageous towards women: "To be born a
woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men." As
a result of this fact, women must constantly survey themselves, carrying an ongoing awareness
of how they present to the world: in this sense, "a woman's self being is split into two." A
woman's identity, then, is comprised of two distinct parts: the surveyor and the surveyed. This is
disastrous for women's ability to feel agency in their lives, as it results in a pressure to behave in
ways that they believe others will approve of or appreciate. This is reinforced by the fact that
men are continually surveying women, determining how to treat them based on the conclusions
that they reach. In order to gain some modicum of control over this unfair process, then, women
are forced to survey themselves before they can be surveyed by others, undertaking a constant
project of self-regulation. This is the constitutive difference between male and female presence:
"men act and women appear," which is to say, female presence is targeted towards constructing
appearances whereas male presence is sufficient in and of itself.

To further explicate this complex point, Berger offers a case study: the oil painting of the female
nude. The first nudes in this tradition depicted Adam and Eve, referring to the biblical tale by
which humans became aware of (and ashamed of) their own nakedness. Notably, in this story,
Eve is blamed for the banishment from paradise, while Adam is figured as the agent of God.
While the story of Adam and Eve has been illustrated since medieval times, a shift took place
during the Renaissance: rather than a strip cartoon or narrative sequence, Adam and Eve were
depicted in a single moment: the moment of shame. With the isolation of this scene, their shame
is understood in relation to the spectator. By the 20th century, this shame became a kind of
display, with nude figures consciously addressing the viewer. Berger inserts an image of an
underwear advertisement to illustrate this, drawing a link between this chapter and the upcoming
chapter on publicity images. As the chapter on publicity will explain, the self-aware nudity and
playful lack of shame exhibited by the "Adam and Eve" figures in the photograph represent one
affect that the advertisement claims to sell, beyond just selling underwear.

As the tradition of painting secularized, more opportunities for painting nudes arose, united by a
common theme: women are never naked in relation to themselves, but rather, naked "as the
spectator sees her." Often, naked women from this tradition either look directly at the spectator,
or look into a mirror, joining the viewer in the act of regarding herself. Interestingly, mirrors
were used to symbolize women's vanity—a hypocritical pursuit, when one considers that the
artists behind these paintings (invariably men) painted them for their own enjoyment. Berger
proposes that the real function of mirrors in these images is to make it clear how women treat
themselves, first and foremost, as sights to be seen.

He then discusses The Judgement of Paris by Rubens, which appeared in the previous photo
essay. In this painting, the act of judgement has become explicit: Paris awards an apple to Helen,
the woman who he has deemed the most beautiful. In the system implied here, the most beautiful
women are given a prize. Berger explains that the real "prize" is to be owned by the judge of
one's beauty. He offers another example to vivify this system: a painting by Lely, commissioned
by Charles the Second, which shows one of the King's mistresses staring passively at the
spectator as she reclines in the nude. This nudity doesn't reflect the woman's own choice, but
rather, her submission to the King's demands. In a sense, by being the owner of the painting, he
also owned the woman.

Berger draws our attention to the fact that, in non-European traditions of painting, nakedness is
never used as a tool of women's marginalization in this way. Inserting photographs from Persian,
African, and Pre-Columbian art, he observes that if a work is meant to have sexual themes, it
conveys them by showing active sexual relations between two people, not an isolated woman to
be looked at. Here, he refers to Kenneth Clark's proposition that "to be naked is simply to be
without clothes, whereas the nude is a form of art." Berger agrees in part—the nude is always
conventionalized and derives its authority through tradition—but unpacks this statement a little
further, interrogating what these conventions actually mean. He observes that the nude female
figure in paintings relates to lived sexuality in a way that's often demeaning to its subject: "To be
nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself." Nudity is a form of
display, substituting the external signifiers of physical form for more meaningful existence.

In the European tradition of oil painting, the principal protagonist of a nude painting is in fact
external to the painting itself: the spectator. Everything in the image is addressed to the
(presumably male) subject who regards it, as though the figures in the painting exist to be looked
at by him. Here, the example of Venus, Cupid, Time, and Love by Bronzino is employed as an
example: Cupid, the male subject of the painting, kisses Venus, the female subject—but her body
is arranged to display it optimally to the male spectator outside the painting, not to realistically
convey the impression that she is engaged in an act of love. It has nothing to do with her
sexuality, but rather, appeals to the viewer's. Berger illustrates this further with two additional
images, one from an Ingres painting and one from a "girlie magazine." Both women make
similar facial expressions: they look at the viewer, "offering up her femininity" with a calculated
smirk, overflowing with charm directed solely at the spectator.

Even when paintings include nude women's male counterparts, Berger observes, the woman's
attention is rarely directed towards him—instead, she looks away from him, out of the picture
and towards the spectator. In such paintings, the viewer is empowered to consider himself "the
true lover—the spectator-owner." In the eighteenth century, a special tradition of pornographic
painting employed these conventions, depicting couples making love but always addressing the
woman's attention towards the spectator, allowing him to imagine himself as part of the fantasy.
Because the painting's spectator is meant to see himself as the protagonist of such a scene, almost
all nude European imagery is frontal. To Berger, this relationship between painting and spectator
is an absurd way of reinforcing the viewer's self-confidence, consoling him in moments of
sadness by reminding him of his masculinity: he is the man for which this display of female
sexuality was constructed.
Berger then moves on to discuss a few rare exceptions that break free from this tradition:
"paintings of loved women, more or less naked." In these paintings, Berger claims, the painter's
own personal vision of his subject is so strong that the spectator is pushed out, forced to witness
the relationship between the painter and his subject rather than inserting himself into the
painting's narrative. In these exceptional images, Berger sees a revolutionary power: the viewer
can no longer deceive himself into believing that the woman is naked for him.

Here, Berger notes that painting nakedness is inherently complicated: nudity has an obvious
sexual function in real life, but this function is also visual—the sight of a beloved in the moment
of desire is overwhelmingly beautiful and provokes a sense of urgency. At the same time,
however, it's kind of banal: any naked person is "more like the rest of their sex than they are
different." This banality draws our attention to the fact that sex is a shared subjective experience.
Thus, painting a static image of sexual nakedness (as opposed to a generalized "nude") is
extremely difficult: isolating one moment in the lived process of sexual relations is inevitably
reductive. Thus, it's easier for photographers and painters to typify their subjects as unspecific
"nudes" onto which the viewer can project their own fantasy, essentially doing the hard work for
them.

Next, he turns to Helene Fourment in a Fur Coat by Rubens. The painting depicts the painter's
second wife, frozen in the act of turning away from the viewer. The eponymous fur coat is about
to slip off her shoulders, leaving her nude—but in this moment, she's still halfway covered.
Berger claims that this painting "contains time and its experience": the spectator is invited to
imagine how, a moment later, she will be entirely naked. Because of a couple of anatomical
impossibilities, the woman's body is rendered as more dynamic—the upper and lower halves of
her body rotate separately—gesturing towards her concealed pelvis, the locus of her sexuality
and the spot where these two impossible halves meet. Rubens has transcended the element of
banality that Berger describes earlier, while retaining the kind of individuality that is impossible
in a nude that's painted exclusively for the generic male spectator's enjoyment.

Berger then explains that these paintings are grounded in the European humanist philosophical
tradition, which privileges individuality. However, the presumed individuality of a painting's
viewer—typically male—was not reflected in its nude female subjects: the woman is "a thing or
an abstraction" to the man who views her. This contradiction carries over into modern art,
plaguing painters as they try to resolve it. One such example is Manet's Olympia, where the
woman, cast in the traditional role of "nude," begins to defiantly question her relationship to the
spectator. The pattern still has yet to be successfully broken: the same underlying attitudes that
contribute to women's oppression have diffused across other media. As a result, many of the
images that we consume today embody a similar "way of seeing" to the oil-painted nudes of late:
that women first and foremost exist as images designed to flatter a male spectator. Laura
Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema argues that in the films of Alfred Hitchcock
(and, indeed, much classical Hollywood cinema), female characters' appearances and behaviors
are calibrated to the pleasure of a male protagonist, with whom the male spectator is supposed to
identify in order to project himself into the film's fantasy. By drawing our attention to this fact,
Berger, like Mulvey, encourages us to question our passive reception of media's gendered
representations, in hopes that by recognizing these codes and their effects, we can eventually
change them.

Ways of Seeing Summary and Analysis of Chapter 4

Summary

Chapter 4 is another series of photos unaccompanied by text. The first two-page spread shows
seven representations of Mary with the baby Jesus, spanning the 12th through 17th centuries. In
some, Mary and Jesus are surrounded by others, whereas in others, like a painting from 1523 by
David, the two are alone. Their surroundings change as the years progress: the settings shift from
relatively empty backgrounds early on to more extensive mise-en-scene, shifting to reflect the
fashionable painting styles of each era.

The next two pages depict scenes of chaos and death. On the left-hand page, two paintings show
communities gathered around dead bodies, with figures scattered throughout the paintings in
relative disarray. The opposite page focuses on images with fewer figures: a Gericault scene with
two distressed-looking heads, a Manet painting depicting a single man lying alone on the ground,
and a painting of two women being guided by a sinister-looking male stranger—likely an
allegory for death—by Hans Baldung Grein.
These images are followed, on the next two pages, by a series of still-life oil paintings. The page
on the left features a painting of a glass, a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, and a pen sitting atop a
table; below that, a painting of several slabs of meat. The page on the right offers a couple of
more complex scenes: two paintings that depict their subjects—tables replete with food and
wine—from further away. None of the paintings on this page are captioned or credited.

Next, a painting of two nude figures: a sleeping woman who reclines, and a man, awake and
sitting upright, watching her. There's no caption, but it appears to be from the Renaissance. On
the opposite page, a painting of two nude figures looking at one another (Venus and Mars) is
situated above a packed scene where a kinglike male figure sits in the center of the image,
surrounded by acolytes including a nude woman, looking down at a reclining male figure bound
in chains at his feet.

On the next page, a painting of a nude woman who is chained to a rock dominates the upper
left-hand side of the page. To her left is a figure cloaked in armor, fighting off a beast that
recedes down the bottom of the image, ostensibly rescuing her. Below that, a painting entitled A
Roman Feast, where a nude woman, her face turned away from the viewer, clings to a man who
appears to be mid-feast as the title suggests. Opposite that, we see Pan and Syrinx, an image of
two reclining nude figures watching another, smaller figure falling into the arms of a river god.
Then, below that, a painting of four figures in a procession, partially clothed, cryptically-titled
Love Seducing Innocence, Pleasure Leading her On, Remorse Following.

On the following page, a photograph of an ornate interior stands alone. In it, five oil paintings
hang on the wall amidst the luxurious furniture, though their subject matter is difficult to resolve.
On the opposite page are three images of commanding male figures, posed like generals
mid-conquest. They all appear to be cropped from their original paintings, though Berger does
not provide us the information to discern whether this is really the case.

The next spread begins with two oil paintings of stately-looking men, depicted from the chest-up,
stacked directly on top of one another (as opposed to the more freeform collage-like format that
Berger employed in the previous photo essay). On the page across from that, paintings of two
women in expnesive but not necessarily ornate-looking dress take up the top half of the page,
and another painting of a man, also cut off at the chest, is situated below them.

The first image on the following page is a man pictured from the bust up, and below him, a
painting of another man looking distraught as he gazes directly at the spectator. Across from that,
another painting of a man, similarly situated in the frame, but looking serious and intelligent as
he regards the viewer with an incredulous expression. Below that, the final image in the essay: a
painting of a man framed from the chest up, much like the previous images, except that he is
turned away from the viewer. He faces a mirror, which reproduces his figure, offering a slightly
smaller but nearly identical figure in the reflection.

Analysis

The first painting in this chapter, Cimabue's Madonna, is also the earliest. Painted in 1285, it
signaled a departure from the earlier norms of Byzantine mosaic, inaugurating a new tradition of
oil painting. In a break with earlier Byzantine art, there's a clear sense of depth and an attempt to
create three-dimensional space visible in the superimposed figures. These shifts all indicate a
move towards the representational codes of "realist" painting, attempting to represent physical
space as it exists in the world. Recall, however, Berger's critique of perspective in Chapter 1: it
centers the entire world on the eye of the spectator, figuring them as a godlike entity, but,
paradoxically, they can only be godlike from this one fixed point. (For a more in-depth critique
of perspective, consider checking out Erwin Panofsky's Perspective as a Symbolic Form).
Following Cimabue's Madonna, we see a selection of other renderings of the "madonna and
child" motif, arranged chronologically across the rest of the two-page spread. Looking at them in
order, we can see the conventions that dominate oil painting beginning to be elaborated: the
illusion of depth is rendered more convincingly, human figures appear more realistic, and the
backgrounds become increasingly complex and enveloping. In this progression, a drive towards
the realist tradition in oil painting is visible; Berger will discuss this tradition—and, of course, its
ideological implications—in greater detail in Chapter 5.

The next two pages contain five vastly different images, unified by their common theme: death.
It's difficult to know exactly what message Berger hoped to get across here, but looking at five
different images of five distinct artistic styles, all united by the shared presence of human
suffering, is harrowing. In the two images on the left-hand page, chaos abounds. In the top
picture, well-wishers crowd around the dying (or perhaps just ill?) body, deep in prayer, making
the frame feel claustrophobic. The bottom image is a scene of complete chaos, with reanimated
skeletons coming to life as they take their revenge on the living. The scene's action is cut off at
the edges of the pictorial frame, carrying the uneasy implication that this type of chaos extends
out of the painting's world and into our own. Then, on the opposite page, we see three images of
death that deal with fewer subjects: two figures in the Gericault painting, three in the Grein, and
only one in the Manet. The connection between these two pages is left open-ended by the lack of
text, so the reader is free to interpret their relationship however they see fit. One possible reading
could be that the paintings on the right denote a more individualistic world view, where one
person's pain and suffering warrant representation, whereas those on the left imply collective
chaos. Neither is particularly optimistic.

The next page also seems to be guided by the theme of death, albeit in a more abstract way.
Though none of the paintings are labelled, they appear to belong to the 17th-century Dutch
tradition of the vanitas: paintings that include signs of decay and impermanence to remind the
viewer of death's inevitability. Only the painting on the bottom left contains a human subject; the
other three approach death more symbolically. Repeated imagery of plants, perishable foods, and
raw meat all draw our attention to the decay that is inevitable for all natural life. On the other
hand, these paintings are increasingly elaborate: the two on the right-hand side feature luxurious
spreads that denote wealth as much as they denote mortality. As Berger will explain in Chapter 5,
this is common of oil painting: the luscious sheen of the thick paint lends itself well to painting
luxurious objects, making them look almost tactile. The looming sense of death, then, might
provide a critique of materialism: we can consume all we want, but we're still going to die.

The following two pages show three different nude paintings, which, if you've been reading the
chapters in order, you'll be able to analyze through the lens of Chapter 3's discussion of the
female nude. In the first image, a sleeping woman reclines, nude, as a male figure sits upright
and watches her. The subject of the painting—a woman being looked at—is mirrored in our
relationship to it, as we, the spectator, mimic the male character's act of looking. Across the page
is Venus and Mars, depicting a duo of nude women that fits Berger's description from Chapter 3
pretty perfectly: they are positioned frontally with regard to the viewer, despite the fact that this
is fully impractical for their interaction with one another. Neither meets the viewer's gaze: one is
asleep, eyes closed; the other looks off into the distance, her physical gesture exhibiting her
femininity but her eyes modestly averted. Below that is a painting that is not labelled. Exactly
what's going on in the scene is difficult to tell—a whole cast of characters surrounds a seated
figure in the middle of a painting. Berger doesn't name the painting or give us any insight into
how we should understand what's happening, but one fact about the scene stands out in relation
to what he's told us already. Two figures are distinguished from the crowded scene as their light
skin is illuminated starkly: the trumpet-playing man, and the woman on the left-hand side. Both
are nude. The man's back is turned towards us as he focuses on playing his instrument; the
woman doesn't seem to do much at all besides stand appealingly. Here, we see the embodiment
of Berger's observation from the previous chapter that "men act" while "women appear."

On the next spread, the visual discourse regarding the female nude continues. The top painting
on the left-hand page depicts a naked woman chained to a rock as a man—fully-clothed in battle
armor—fights off a monster that has apparently trapped her there. Although she is shackled to
the rock, the woman's body faces frontally towards the viewer, an unnatural physical position
that, as Berger observes in Chapter 3, makes it appear as though her nudity exists specifically for
the viewer's visual pleasure. This effect is heightened by the dramatic difference between light
and dark in the image: the nude woman's white skin contrasts sharply with the dark background,
further emphasizing her body and bolstering the impression that she exists to be looked at. Below
that, another image, captioned A Roman Feast, 19th Century, features a similar interplay of light
and dark to emphasize another female nude. Curiously, although the title tells us that the painting
depicts a feast, there is no food being served--only a man drinking a glass of wine as a naked
woman, her back to the viewer, clings onto him. The woman's face isn't visible, and the curvature
of her body is emphasized as it contrasts against the darker background. As we consider the title
and subject matter of this image, the question arises: what, exactly, is being consumed here?
Perhaps one might venture to say that the woman in this image exists for our perceptual
consumption, again returning to Berger's thesis from Chapter 3 that, as opposed to mere
nakedness, nudity exists for the pleasure of the (ostensibly male) viewer.
On the opposite page, we see Pan and Syrinx, a scene from Ovid's Metamorphoses that depicts
Pan, a satyr, pursuing Syrinx, a wood nymph. In the story, Syrinx escapes from Pan by
transforming into a bundle of marsh reeds, evading his embrace as she falls into the river. This
painting depicts the moment as Syrinx begs her sisters, the river nymphs, to help her evade Pan's
embrace, right as Cupid encourages Pan to pursue her. This painting could be read through the
lens of Chapter 3's discussion of ownership: to own a painting of a female nude is, implicitly, to
"own" its subject matter, just as Pan hopes to possess Syrinx. The pursuit we see depicted in this
image mirrors the viewer's position as "spectator-owner," as Berger put it in the previous chapter.
This is reinforced by the paintings' composition, which places the female nudes front and center,
with Syrinx addressing the viewer frontally (although her gaze is turned away) and one of the
sisters with her back turned, shoulders squared to the viewer: in this construction, the naked
women are the center of the narrative (and of the viewer's attention). Below that, Berger
reproduces an image of Love Seducing Innocence, Pleasure Leading Her On, Remorse
Following. In this allegorical painting, Innocence is figured as a young woman, being led along
by Love—not the standard youthful Cupid, but a grown-up incarnation, identifiable by his quiver
of arrows. Pleasure, a cherub-like figure, leads the procession, pulling Innocence's sheer dress off
her body. Behind them looms Remorse, a dark figure holding his forehead in his hand.
Interestingly, Love is the only nude figure in this painting, although Innocence is equally the
center of attention. The moment captured in this image recalls the painting of Rubens' young
wife from Chapter 3, with a fur draped over her shoulders, about to slip off. With her garment
slipping precariously off her body, Innocence is captured in the moment of seduction, imbuing
the painting with an almost cinematic temporality.

Turn the page, and you'll find the right-hand page dominated by a single image: a photograph an
ornate interior with gilded walls and baroque furniture. Within this image, there are several
others: five portraits hang on the wall, three large and two small. This image recalls Berger's
discussion of paintings' reproducibility in Chapter 1: how do the meanings of these portraits
change when they are visible outside of the (obviously elite and exclusive) space where they
hang in the image? By being photographed, the paintings are reproduced, allowing them to
circulate more freely and opening them to a multiplicity of meanings. The extremely ornate
setting of this photograph also alludes to the connection between oil painting, wealth, and
capitalism, which Berger will elaborate in Chapter 5. On the right-hand side, we see three
portraits of important-looking men, painted in the tradition of the portraits hanging on the wall
on the opposite page. Unlike the women we've seen earlier in the chapter, these men are all fully
clothed, and typically depicted from the knees up. The impression of power that they convey
derives from their confident stances—the subject of the image on the far right gestures outward,
as though he were commanding an army—as well as their highly decorative clothing and
uniformly unimpressed expressions. These paintings further confirm Berger's proposition that, in
painting, "men act while women appear."

On the next page, we see two more portraits of men. On the top, a painting by Frans Hals that
some will recognize as a portrait of Descartes; below that, a Velasquez painting entitled Court
Fool. These images are difficult to situate in relation to what we've seen and read so far—their
relationship to the text is uncertain. Perhaps, in this sense, they're deliberately obscure,
encouraging us to wrestle with their possible meaning. One potential reading might focus on the
inclusion of Descartes, whose famous credo, "I think, therefore I am," informs the conventions of
perspective that Berger discussed earlier. In paintings of perspectival space, the entire world is
centered on the eye of the beholder, situating them in a godlike position (although this is a
paradox, because, unlike an omniscient God, they can only be in one place at one time). The
"court fool" in the image below might be interpreted as precisely the opposite of the
philosopher—one who stands for the "lower" values, perhaps in a rejection of Cartesian dualism.
Again, the contrast between these images and the female nudes we've seen earlier is stark: the
subjects of both paintings are fully-clothed, and their existence doesn't appear centered on the
visual pleasure of the spectator. Sure, they're nice to look at, but neither attempts to position the
viewer as the protagonist of the painting's narrative.

Opposite these, we see two paintings of women and one of a man. The women are depicted in
full, and for the first time in this chapter, both are fully clothed. Like the paintings on the
opposite page, their meaning in relation to the rest of the text is difficult to discern. We might
hypothesize from the women's rich dresses that both are fairly well-off, alluding to the following
chapter's analysis of oil painting and wealth. Both are also represented within apparently
domestic spaces, suggesting that, even when women are painted clothed, the relationship
between spectatorship and ownership that Berger described in female nudes is still subtly at play.
The index at the end of the book reveals that the bottom painting—in which is depicted the only
man on the page—is Géricault's Mad Kidnapper, further elaborating the question of
spectatorship and ownership: does the owner of these paintings "possess" the women depicted
within them? What about the owner of this book, who owns the paintings' reproductions? Of
course, none of these questions are posed explicitly by the essay, and any other analytic that the
reader finds to interpret them must be considered equally valid.

The next spread features three self-portraits: all male artists pictured from the chest-up,
contrasted against a fourth image of a subject facing away. Painted by Dürer, Rembrandt, and
Goya respectively, the first three portraits broach the question of artistic self-representation: in
light of Berger's point in Chapter 1 that all images implicitly reflect the artist's own "way of
seeing," what does it mean to look at an artist's representation of himself? In this way, these
portraits could be taken as valuable documents of the artists' interior psychology, externalizing
the ways they saw themselves in the world at a given place and time. Interestingly, all three of
these men look out at the viewer. In contrast to many of the women we've seen in this essay, their
gaze is somewhat confrontational—the spectator is brought into these images not by being cast
into the narrative (as they are in the case of the female nude), but by returning the gaze of the
self-depicted artist. The fourth image on the right-hand page, also the last in the chapter, seems to
reverse the composition of the first three: a male subject is pictured, again from the waist up, but
he faces away from the viewer and into a mirror. In the reflection, the same figure is reproduced
identically: not a forward-facing reflection, as one would expect in real life. This painting, by
René Magritte, is given the tongue-in-cheek title Not to be reproduced. Of course, the figure in
the painting is reproduced in the mirror, much like the image itself is reproduced in this book.
Here, we see Magritte alluding to the questions of art's mechanical reproducibility that Berger
examined in Chapter 1: given the obvious act of reproduction within the painting itself, it appears
that Magritte mocks the conservative critics who condemn art's reproducibility, aligning himself
with Berger's thesis (adapted from Benjamin) that reproduction democratizes art by creating
broader possibilities for interpretation.

Ways of Seeing Summary and Analysis of Chapter 5

Summary
Chapter 5 focuses on a specific tradition of oil painting, which reached its fullest embodiment
roughly between 1500 and 1900. In this tradition, the emphasis is often on objects that are
buyable, suggesting a relationship between oil painting and the desire to possess. Although the
literal act of oil painting has existed for centuries--pigments have been mixed with oil to create
paint since the ancient world—the tradition that Berger refers to here is characterized by its
emergence at around the time that capitalism began to take hold in Europe. This tradition set the
norms that continue to define pictorial representation, privileging a certain sort of formal
verisimilitude that continues to inform our understanding of "artistic genius."

Berger begins the chapter by posing the question: "What is a love of art?" Within this tradition of
oil painting, "love of art" comes to stand in for "desire to possess." This is illustrated with a
painting of an art collector, depicted amongst his vast collection of paintings. In the logic of this
picture—which represents the logic of oil painting in whole—paintings are, before all else,
objects to be owned. The contents that these paintings depict, then, exist as images of that which
the collector may possess. This logic is related to the elaboration of capitalism in Europe around
the time that the oil painting tradition came into fashion: the implicit possibility of owning
objects depicted in oil painting upholds the ruling classes' desire to entrench the emerging power
of capital. Moreover, Berger argues that this worldview, with its new attitudes towards property
and exchange, was expressed by oil painting better than it could have been by any other medium:
oil painting "reduced everything to the equality of objects" by privileging a certain kind of
pictorial realism that created the impression of materiality. Oil painting is unique in its capacity
to render the tangible details of an object, suggesting a greater degree of dimension, texture, and
solidity than other mediums. As such, it lends itself to the glorification of physical objects,
conflating the tangible with the real and, by extension, glorifying possession.

Notably, only a fraction of paintings from the multiple-century tradition are today considered
"masterful." So what characterizes the large number of "mediocre" works? To Berger, this
mediocracy comes from the fact that the average oil painting implicated in this tradition is
essentially "hack work"—rather than meaningfully expressing any particular values, these
paintings were created so that painters could put them to market and earn their keep. This
contradiction between art and the market runs through the entire tradition of oil painting, lending
a certain emptiness to most of its works. Berger refers here to Holbein's The Ambassadors, full of
impressively-rendered objects that surround two men. The objects in the painting have all been
elaborately worked over, possessing immaculate detail that creates the impression the viewer
might reach out and touch them. This bolsters the visual desirability of these objects, serving an
ideology that encourages people to buy material goods. However, a skull in the foreground of the
painting is irreconcilable with this style: it is distorted and unrealistic, perhaps because of its
metaphysical symbolism as a memento mori. Herein lies a major problem within this tradition of
oil painting: there's little room for symbolism in a tradition that, first and foremost, privileges the
tactile materiality of objects. This contradiction explains why, for example, oil paintings of Mary
Magdalen appear so vacuous: the lustrous realism of the medium contradicts her own narrative
of piety.

Berger mentions a couple of exceptional painters who deviate from this tradition, among them
William Blake, who, despite studying oil painting, preferred to represent subjects as though they
are transparent, unbound by the laws of gravity, or overall insubstantial. This sharply contrasts
with Holbein's Ambassadors, which Berger returns to once again. He observes that the men in
the painting gaze at the viewer with a strange sense of formality. Surrounded by objects
associated with colonial conquest, Berger posits that this rigidity conveys a larger worldview in
which the ruling class believed the world existed to serve them. Such a worldview undergirded
colonialism, meaning that paintings like Holbein's upheld the oppressive relationship between
colonizer and colonized. Here is another implicit contradiction: the men in the painting suggest a
kind of "individual presence," through their distance and aloofness, yet this
individualism—which implies equality between all individuals—is used in service of a colonial
project that makes equality inconceivable. Similar contradictions run throughout oil painted
portraits: the representational realism of the works makes it seem as though the viewer is close to
the subject, yet the subject's formal distance and rigidity push the viewer away. This, says
Berger, makes many oil painted portraits appear hollow, even comparing the expressions of their
subjects to "masks."

Another genre within oil painting is the still-life. These, in Berger's view, amount to "simple
demonstrations of what gold or money could buy," capitalizing on oil painting's capacity for
representational verisimilitude to make material goods look appealing and incite a desire in the
viewer to own more things. The same is true of paintings of animals and buildings, both of which
tend to choose their subject matter for its association with social status—rather than depicting
naturally beautiful exciting livestock or buildings, they tend to focus on objects that confirm the
social status of their owners.

The category within oil painting considered to be "highest" was the mythological or historical
picture. These were held in especially high esteem because, in the elite milieux where they
circulated, knowledge of the classics was associated with moral virtue. However, to Berger, these
paintings tend to strike a contemporary viewer as the emptiest of all. This is because their
purpose was to supply the cultural elite with a set of references for their own behavior, allowing
them to further the project of their own self-glorification. Rather than stimulating the viewer's
imagination, they simply furnish him with an allegorical representation of his own experiences,
reinforcing their own nobility. These paintings, then, must be empty: they require the space for
the viewer to project his own experiences onto them.

Then, there's the "genre picture"—the opposite of the mythological painting in terms of
perceived value. Genre paintings were thought to be vulgar, and served to prove that virtue was
correlated with financial success. They peddled the "sentimental lie" that morality and wealth
were connected, implicitly confirming the virtue of anyone who could afford to own one such
painting. The average genre painting, according to Berger, asserts that the poor are happy serving
the rich, whom they invariably aspire to become.

However, one category of oil painting deviates substantially from the tradition thus established:
the landscape. This is primarily because, during the era in which the tradition was most
prominent, nature wasn't yet subject to the activities of capitalism. Nature could never be
possessed, and it could never be rendered as a tangible object. Thus, landscape painting, which
began in Holland in the seventeenth century, remained relatively independent from the broader
oil painting tradition. Nonetheless, certain exceptions to this statement exist, such as
Gainsborough's Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. The painting depicts a wealthy couple amidst a beautiful
landscape—but because of the couple's inclusion, the landscape is fundamentally figured as an
object of their property. The traditional art-historical narrative dictates that they wanted to be
painted on their land due to their philosophical appreciation of nature, but Berger posits that this
painting served another purpose: glamorizing the fact of land ownership.
Berger then claims that the essential character of oil painting is almost universally
misunderstood: the dominant narrative within art history claims that oil paintings function as
"windows open on to the world," yet, following his analysis, they function more like "a safe," a
vault into which "the visible has been deposited" as the value of material goods is emphasized.
The common misunderstanding of this tradition, claims Berger, happens because certain masters,
like Rembrandt and Vermeer, broke free of its typical boundaries. Thus, the stereotype of the
"great artist' emerged from the oil painting tradition, when, in reality, the works that are
remembered today as masterful account for a relatively small percentage of oil paintings, and
tend to contradict the values of the broader tradition itself. The stereotypical master in this
tradition is plagued by one of its contradictions: artists are plagued by the fact that their paintings
celebrate material goods and elite social status, caught in the contradiction between oil painting's
visual language and the broader role of art.

To separate oneself from this tradition, then, requires an enormous degree of effort. Berger offers
Rembrandt as one example of an artist who successfully divorced himself from the norms of the
oil painting tradition—a shift that was fundamental to his reputation for mastery. He compares
two self-portraits. The first, painted according to the conventions of this tradition, depicts
nominally happy subjects, but conveys a sense of existential emptiness, richly advertising the
subjects' good fortune and yet giving a sense of formality and rigidity beneath its veneer of
happiness. In the second portrait, painted three decades later, the luscious, tangible details that
characterized typical oil painting are absent. Only the painter remains, and his face is the most
detailed area of the painting. All that's left in this painting, says Berger, is "the question of
existence"—Rembrandt has successfully reappropriated the medium, refocusing it on deeper
questions that the superficial glorification of material property.

Analysis

Chapter 5 returns to the standard text-and-image essay format that Berger employs in Chapters 1
and 3, using images to illustrate his writing. It begins with the observation—somewhat
tongue-in-cheek—that "oil paintings often depict things," continuing by pointing out that these
things are almost always, as it happens, buyable. Then, Berger notes that depicting an object in
oil painting is similar to buying and owning the object. This thesis is, at first, controversial:
owning a painting of a thing is not at all the same as owning the thing itself, when the painted
object has no use value! But Berger will elaborate this over the course of the chapter, building a
complex analogy between possessing something in real-life and the way of seeing that is implicit
in the tradition of oil painting.

The possessive impulse often encoded in oil painting was first pointed out by the anthropologist
Claude Levi-Strauss. Berger quotes Levi-Strauss' proposition that some art contains an "avid and
ambitious desire to take possession of the object for the benefit of the owner or even the
spectator," accrediting this tendency to Western civilization as a whole. Berger narrows this
proposition, claiming that it applies most strongly within the period of traditional oil painting.
Although oil painting as a medium has existed since the ancient world, Berger points out that the
peak of the tradition emerged when a specific style and technique, inaugurated by the use of oil
on canvas, began to be elaborated in sixteenth-century Europe. The traditional way of seeing that
Berger associates with oil painting continued until the late-19th century advent of Impressionism
and Cubism; this is largely due to the fact that, as Berger points out, it hinges on a sense of
verisimilitude. When photography became more widespread, the representational "realism" that
characterized this tradition of oil painting became redundant, as it was no longer the medium best
suited for capturing "pictorial likeness." However, during the time of its reign, this style of oil
painting defined the conventions like "realism" and "artistic genius" that continue to guide art
history today. Notably, he points out that this tradition is associated with the belief that "art
prospers if enough individuals in society have a love of art"—indeed, this is the position that
Kenneth Clark takes up in Civilization. Berger wants to probe deeper by asking further: "What is
a love of art?"

Berger then inserts an image of a painting that depicts a room full of paintings: its subject is a
seventeenth-century painting collector, an "art lover" in the sense that Clark's Civilization seeks
to glorify. In the context of this image, as Berger points out, paintings are first and foremost
objects to be bought and owned. This sense of ownership relies on the paintings' status as unique
objects, drawing our attention back to Chapter 1's discourse on reproducibility: once the
widespread reproduction of images means that paintings are no longer "unique," a convoluted
attempt to retroactively glorify them tends to take hold, insisting that the artwork's value derives
from its status as the original of a reproduction. In the painting full of paintings we see here,
artworks are "sights of what [the subject] may possess"—and this is equally true of both the
paintings within the painting and the larger painting itself. Berger refers once again to
Levi-Strauss, who explains that, beginning in the Renaissance, painting became an "instrument
of possession" thanks to the immense wealth amassed by the ruling class, particularly in Italy.

This observation is crucial: Berger reminds us of a point he's made in Chapter 1, that the art of
any period tends to serve the ideological interests of the ruling class. This is especially true in the
case of the Renaissance, where the power of capital—that is, the power of money as opposed to
land, merchants as opposed to aristocrats—was relatively new. Berger then proposes that the new
attitudes towards property and exchange that began to take hold during this period were better
expressed in oil painting than they possibly could have been by any other art form—a lofty
proposition indeed. He follows this by noting that "oil painting did to appearances what capital
did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects." Oil painting rendered
anything that could be depicted as a commodity, reinforcing the logic of market exchange and
privileging wealth. Sure, some exceptions to this tradition exist—Berger lists Rembrandt, El
Greco, Giorgione, Vermeer, and Turner as possible examples—but in general, oil paintings that
are remembered today as historically important tend to represent a small subset of the overall
tradition, disproportionately glorifying the work of a small cadre of "masters." The difficulty of
this fact will become clear to anyone who visits an art museum, only to find themselves
overwhelmed by the number of works on display, struggling to differentiate between the
"third-rate" and "outstanding" works, perhaps because of the arbitrariness of the metrics by
which we're taught to evaluate them.

In oil painting specifically, Berger observes that the differential between "masterpiece" and
"average work" is exceptionally wide: not only does a "masterpiece" oil painting boast technical
mastery and impressive imagination, but also a certain morale. The average work, he explains,
was produced cynically, by a painter who was likely commissioned to depict a subject to which
they were essentially indifferent in order to sell the painting as a product. This "hack work" is,
Berger explains, a direct result of the market's increasingly insistent demands on art, which
corresponds with the peak of the oil painting tradition. One can easily think of numerous
contemporary artworks that illustrate this paradigm—works made average by their obvious
investment in commercial value.
He then explains another central aspect of this oil painting tradition: the nature of the medium
lends itself especially well to rendering "the tangibility, the texture, the lustre, the solidity" of its
subject. This lends itself to a worldview in which "the real" is that which can be touched. Though
the painted objects are two-dimensional, they suggest the appearance of depth, texture, and even
temperature—tactile aspects that make it seem as though the viewer can physically feel the
objects being represented. And, if one considers it, the jump from touching an object to
possessing it is not so large after all. This point is illustrated by Holbein's The Ambassadors,
painted in 1533, where Berger situates the beginning of this oil painting tradition. The painting's
technique is extremely detailed and precise, calculated to put the spectator under the illusion that
they are looking at real objects. Every detail lends itself to the sense that the viewer could touch
the thing being depicted. As the viewer moves their gaze across the painting, every object
represented is immediately "translated....into the language of tactile sensation." Although there
are two figures in the painting engaged in some kind of interaction that might constitute a
narrative, the materials and objects that surround them are truly front-and-center.

This tradition of oil painting, explains Berger, celebrated a "new kind of wealth"—unlike the
fixed order of social class that had previously dominated, oil paintings came about at a time
when wealth could be gained and accumulated. As such, the paintings that originated around this
time had to demonstrate the desirability of all the goods that money could buy in order to uphold
the interests of the elite. It is precisely this desirability that oil painting reinforces: the special
sense of tangibility that the medium can offer supports the belief that the objects depicted are
rewarding to touch, and, by extension, to own.

Curiously, in the Holbein painting, one object is depicted quite unlike all the others: a
mysterious, distorted oval form at the bottom of the painting. Berger reads this object as a skull,
noting that it served as a kind of memento mori: among all these realistically-rendered signs of
wealth remains one distorted symbol of death. By rendering the skull differently from the other
objects in the painting, Holbein imbues it with metaphysical implications: it is not merely an
object to be touched and owned, but rather, a source of symbolic meaning. This alludes to the
problem of depicting metaphysical symbols in oil painting: the "static materialism" and tendency
towards pictorial realism tends to make symbols too literal. For this reason, Berger claims,
religious oil paintings appear "hypocritical": the medium and stylistic inclinations of oil painting
lend themselves to a literal, tangible depiction of the subject. This is illustrated by several oil
paintings of Mary Magdalen, whose story revolves around the fact that she loved Christ so
strongly, she came to accept the morality of flesh and repented for her past. However, the method
by which she is painted makes it appear that this transformation hasn't taken place—given the
materiality encouraged by the form, she is still depicted as "a takeable and desirable woman," the
object of seduction.

Berger then turns our attention to the exceptional case of William Blake, whose training reflected
the tradition of oil painting, yet whose works departed from it. He rarely painted in oil, instead
seeking to depict figures as insubstantial, transparent, and intangible. This desire to transcend the
materiality of oil painting, says Berger, offers us insights into the limitations of the typical oil
painting tradition.

He returns, now, to Holbein's Ambassadors. He points out that the men in the painting face the
spectator, but their faces and stances betray a lack of expectation of recognition; it appears that
they are looking out of the painting onto something that excludes them. The objects depicted in
the painting might help us decode this relationship: on the shelf between them sits a set of
scientific instruments, a globe, a book of Christian hymns, and a lute. This globe reflects the
newfound knowledge attained by Magellan's expeditions, which fundamentally undergirded
colonial conquest; likewise, the books and lute represent the necessity of converting natives to
Christianity and indoctrinating them to believe European civilization was more advanced,
including its art. From this information, Berger proposes that the two ambassadors depicted in
this painting were members of a class that believed "the world was there to furnish their
residence in it": in other words, they were the agents of colonial conquest. Here, Berger notes
that the relations between conqueror and colonized tended to be self-perpetuating as "the sight of
the other confirmed each in his inhuman estimate of himself"—essentially, to look at and to be
seen by the other reinforces both the colonizer and the colonized's understanding of himself. The
ambassadors in Holbein's painting conveys a sense of aloofness that might be read as
"individualized presence" or a kind that hadn't been seen before: the prospect of individualism
insists on equality, but simultaneously relies on a system (in this case, colonialism) that makes
actual equality inconceivable.
This conflict is also visible in other oil paintings, such as Suttermans' portrait of Ferdinand the
Second of Tuscany and Vittoria Della Rovere. The formal verisimilitude of oil painting lends
itself to the illusion that the viewer is within touching distance—and therefore, close and
intimate—with the painting's subjects. Yet, their rigidity conveys a sort of distance, entrenching a
sense of artificiality within the painting. This, Berger says, characterizes many "average"
portraits from the oil painting tradition: the contradiction between the medium's closeness and
the subject's distance creates an unnatural circumstance in which the subject matter appears at
once nearby and far away, like "specimens under a microscope." As the oil painting portrait grew
into an increasingly codified tradition, the sitter's face came to be painted in a more and more
generalized fashion—as Berger puts it, "his features became the mask which went with the
costume." The tension between oil painting's formal verisimilitude and representational distance
was never resolved, resulting in a similar artificiality and discomfort to the "puppet TV
appearance of the average politician."

Beyond portraiture, Berger discusses a category of painting unique to this oil painting tradition:
the still life. Before oil painting, gold leaf was sometimes used by Medieval painters to convey a
sense of wealth; oil painting, rather than using actual gold paint, became a representation of what
gold (or, more generally, money) could buy. Rather than painting with gold, painters started to
make riches their subject matter—paintings of what gold could buy. Berger illustrates this with
an image of Still Life With a Lobster by De Heem, which renders an elaborate feast in extreme
detail, showing off both the painter's technical mastery and the owner's wealth and luxurious
lifestyle. Similarly, paintings of livestock from this tradition emphasized wealth by depicting the
animals "like pieces of furniture with four legs," focusing on the pedigree and glorifying the fact
of ownership. Similarly, paintings of buildings from this tradition tended to choose their subject
matter not for its architectural interest, but for its status as a feature of landed property.

The most esteemed category in this tradition of oil painting, Berger explains, was the historical
or mythological painting. However, as he observes, these paintings tend to strike the modern
viewer as especially vacuous—but their historical prestige and contemporary emptiness are,
according to Berger, directly related. The study of classics has historically been associated with a
wealthy milieu, in which classical knowledge is thought to convey moral value. Berger debunks
this connection by stating that classical texts "supplied the higher strata of the ruling class with a
system of references for the forms of their own idealized behavior"—in essence, they set forth a
series of codes and etiquette by which the elite could justify their behavior. Due to this fact,
mythological oil paintings tend not to stimulate the viewer's imagination. Rather, they serve to
embellish and illuminate the experiences that the viewer has already had, in order to confirm his
preexisting view of himself as "noble." In this sense, the mythological scene, says Berger,
"functions like a garment held out for the spectator-owner to put his arms into and wear": the
scene, although fundamentally empty, serves to entertain the viewer's own conception of himself.

In opposition to the glorified mythological painting stood the "genre picture," which was thought
to be vulgar. These paintings served to uphold the view that virtue was rewarded by social and
financial success, meaning that "those who could afford to buy these pictures...had their virtue
confirmed." The tactility and materiality suggested by oil painting helped bolster this worldview,
which Berger calls a "sentimental lie": the medium helped create realistic scenes that made a
world in which virtue and wealth were correlated appear plausible. When painters deviated from
this convention, as did Adriaen Brouwer, their works—which represented "cheap" or "low-life"
scenes with bitter realism—were impossible to sell, commanding no market value. Berger then
discusses two genre paintings by Hals as examples. The subjects of both paintings are smiling,
offering goods for sale, ostensibly to a wealthy owner-spectator. Their smiles convey a desire to
ingratiate themselves with the rich in order to make a sale or gain a job, asserting that they are
happy to participate in the system of exchange that oppresses them.

Berger then notes that, out of every genre of oil painting, landscape represents the biggest
exception to the tradition. Throughout the history of this tradition, nature was though of as
outside capitalism—it was the realm in which everything existed, but it defied possession.
Herein lies the major problem with landscape oil paintings: the sky, for example, has no
tangibility. Contrary to the general tradition of oil painting, the tradition of the landscape led
progressively away from the desire to depict objects as tangible and substantial, leaning instead
toward subject matter too large, too nebulous, to grasp. Nevertheless, some landscape paintings
fit within the broader oil painting tradition. Here, Berger points towards Gainsborough's Mr. and
Mrs. Andrews. Contrary to Kenneth Clark's evaluation of the picture, which Berger quotes at
length, he encourages the reader to question why the nobles depicted in the painting would want
to own a painting of themselves against the backdrop of their own land. This painting, argues
Berger, fundamentally figures its subjects as landowners, exercising a proprietary attitude
towards their surroundings. Earlier art historians like Lawrence Gowing argued that the subjects
were merely engaged in philosophical enjoyment of nature, but Berger refutes this claim as
disingenuous. Of course it's possible that Mr. and Mrs. Andrews admired nature, but this doesn't
preclude them from desiring to own it—in fact, the very distinction of land as "uncorrupted and
unperverted nature" worthy of enjoyment relies on sharp property distinctions, wherein
individuals can generally only enjoy the parts of nature that belong to them. Try avoiding a
conviction for trespassing charges by claiming you simply meant to commune with nature. The
point Berger makes here is that paintings like this primarily serve to give their owners a sense of
pleasure by marveling at themselves among the beautiful land that they own.

Berger observes that the oil painting tradition conceives of itself as "an imaginary window open
onto the world." But by his analysis, the paintings from this tradition are less like windows, and
more like "a safe in which the visible has been deposited." Aside from a handful of masters
whose exceptional works broke free of the tradition's norms, most oil painting is, by Berger's
assessment, mediocre and obsessed with property. From this tradition, however, the stereotype of
"the great artist" managed to emerge. This stereotype suggests that the masterful artist—always
male—lives a life consumed by struggle, fighting the society that fails to comprehend their
genius as much as they battle their own interior psychology. This struggle, Berger asserts, was
underpinned by the oil painting tradition: painters became disillusioned with the realization that
their work was limited to a celebration of material objects. Exceptional painters, then, had to
unlearn the conventions of this tradition, which they likely studied on their path to artistic
mastery. Two side-by-side self-portraits by Rembrandt, painted thirty years apart, are referenced
here. In the first, he shows off Saskia, his young bride, who died six years later—but the apparent
happiness of the scene is actually empty and unfelt, undercut by a sense of artifice that arises
from the contradiction in oil painting portraits that Berger discussed earlier. Berger refers to the
painting as "an advertisement for the sitter's good fortune," observing that, "like all such
advertisements it is heartless." By the second painting, thirty years later, Rembrandt managed to
"turn the tradition against itself." Appearing alone in the portrait, the painter is now an old man.
Though it uses the same medium, the painting is free from the traditional conventions of oil
painting, departing from the usual emphasis on tactile and material objects. What remains, then,
is simply the painter's image of himself, turning the focus from material questions to existential
ones.

Ways of Seeing Summary and Analysis of Chapter 6

Summary

Chapter 6 is the final essay in the book to use only images. The first spread shows us three
paintings: Europe Supported by Africa and America, Pity, and Mildew Blighting Ears of Corn.
All appear to be oil paintings of various styles. In the first, three nude females stand together,
with the lightest-skinned woman in front, held up by the other two. Below that, in Pity, one
figure looks down at another, apparently dead, from amidst a sea of abstract figures resembling
both waves and horses. One painting dominates the opposite page: two figures, more abstract
than most of what we've seen before, surrounded by a series of swirls rather than a distinct
background.

On the next page, an oil painting of a wealthy white woman being dressed by two black
women—ostensibly servants—appears above another oil painting of a slave auction. In the
second painting, slaves are being sold on one side of the auction house while paintings are being
sold on the other. Across from these images, we see two portraits of noble-looking white figures
being assisted by black people, and a portrait of two black men below that.

The next spread contains only two images, one on each page. Both appear to be portraits of
children, depicted from the waist up. The first child looks distraught, gazing uncomfortably up at
the viewer. The child in the second portrait averts his gaze, looking happily off into the distance.
Both children are white.

The following two pages are populated by several oil paintings of domestic scenes: a family at
the table, women in the kitchen, a man in a bedroom, and a cluster of figures leaned over a pot,
either cooking or alchemizing. For the first time in the book, images spill across both pages,
severed in the middle by the fold of the book's spine.
The next page is full of oil paintings of animals. The six paintings on the left-hand side primarily
depict household pets; the four on the right show horses. The image on the top right is the only
one without animal subjects; in it, a noble-looking family is painted against the backdrop of a
luxurious garden (which ostensibly belongs to them).

The following spread includes numerous paintings of diverse subjects matter. The top two
paintings on the left-hand page show crowded scenes of nobility from two different historical
periods: one depicting a decadent Roman feast, the other, a Parisian salon. Below that are two
smaller portraits of women: one noblewoman depicted in wealthy dress, and one nude female
reclining into the ocean as a mostly-submerged male figure reaches up at her. The top of the
right-hand page features two paintings of nude women, one entitled Witches Sabbath, and the
other The Temptation of St. Anthony. These titles hint at the fact that the women in each painting
are engaged in "immoral" acts—witchcraft and seduction. Below those, there's an image of
Psyche's Bath, a nude woman reflected in the pool below her, and La Fortune. Because these
images are so small, it's difficult to make out the paintings' exact subject matter, but there
appears to be a naked woman on the left-hand side, and the wispy spots of grey that surround her
suggest that she may be on fire.

Analysis

Right off the bat, it's necessary to mention that all the paintings in this essay appear to be oil
paintings. With this in mind, they should be considered through the lens of Berger's analysis in
Chapter 5, specifically the paradigm in which traditional oil painting reinforces the capitalist
values of wealth accumulation and material possession.

The first painting in this essay depicts three nude female figures. Berger's analysis from Chapter
3 applies quite presciently here: all three face frontally towards the viewer, yet their gazes are
either bashfully averted or coyly angled subtly towards them. In this sense, they mirror the
conventions of female nudes that Berger described earlier: their positioning centers the painting
onto the eye of the spectator, allowing a (presumably male) viewer to cast himself into the
painting's narrative and imagine himself as the recipient of sexual pleasure. Interestingly,
however, this painting appears to critique the European tradition from which these nudes
developed: it shows the white figure, who the title suggests stands in for Europe, being
physically supported by two darker-skinned women, bound in ropes and shackles, cast as Africa
and America. In that sense, this painting could be understood as a critique of colonialism,
suggesting that Europe's global power relies on the support of other lands—a support that is
violently forced and too often masked.

Below that, we see William Blake's Pity, taken from Macbeth. Pity draws on the connection
between light skin and moral purity that was popularly held at the time, with the benevolent
figure of a divine spirit painted among grey horses. This reflects Blake's interest in the characters
of different horses, which, read in the context of the other images in this spread, could be
understood as racially coded. Unlike the other paintings by Blake that Berger includes, this one
works within the traditional visual language of oil painting.

On the opposite page, one image presides: Mildew Blighting Ears of Corn, also by Blake. This
resembles the painting by Blake that Berger referenced in the previous chapter as an exception to
the oil painting tradition: its figures are abstract, abandoning representational verisimilitude for a
more expressive style. Although both figures are naked, they don't seem to fit within the
conventions of nudity that Berger described in Chapter 3, either. There is nothing in this image to
be possessed; it is evocative primarily thanks to its interesting composition and delicate forms.
The subjects in this painting are more ethereal than the oil paintings we see throughout most of
this essay, lacking the same tangibility that's typical of oil painting. In light of the analysis in
Chapter 3, Berger would seem to read this as a positive trait, gesturing against traditional oil
paintings' glorification of material ownership.

On the next page, we see an oil painting of a wealthy white woman being dressed by two black
women. Though the black women are also dressed luxuriously, their position on the floor, while
the white woman sits in a chair, indicates that they are subservient to her. Below that is a painting
of an auction house, in which slaves and paintings are being sold side by side. The top two
images on the right-hand page also depict wealthy-looking white subjects surrounded by
subservient black figures. In all of these paintings, the system of ownership that Berger describes
in Chapter 3 is evident, and even more poignant when one realizes that the "objects" that the oil
painting tradition would typically seek to encourage ownership of are, in this case, people. If we
accept Berger's proposition that oil painting, as a medium, encourages property ownership more
than any other medium thanks to its capacity for rich, detailed depictions, then the "way of
seeing" encoded in these paintings is extremely troubling. Interestingly, these four images are
contrasted against a portrait of two black men, seen from the waist up. The relationship between
this image and the previous four is uncertain, as, like in previous photo essays, Berger offers no
clarifying text. One possible reading could be positive: the men appear stately and handsome,
with the rich verisimilitude enabled by oil painting rendering them masterfully. On the other
hand, given the relationship between painting and ownership, this may not be the case: if, as
Berger suggests in Chapter 3 (and again, albeit more subtly, in Chapter 5), to own a painting is
implicitly to own its subject matter, then perhaps this painting posits black people as just another
subject to be bought.

The following page contains only two images, both of children. The child on the left-hand side
seems distraught, looking up at the subject through a furrowed brow. The index tells us that this
is a photograph by an unknown artist, depicting Sarah Burge, a young orphan in an institution
established by Dr. Barnardo. This photo was taken in 1833, relatively early in the history of
photography. Without knowing much about the photograph besides its title, we can still locate it
relative to the tradition of "genre pictures" that Berger describes for oil painting: in these didactic
(and ultimately idealistic) images, wealth is associated with moral purity and poverty with lack
of virtue. By depicting an unfortunate child, this photo challenges those associations: would
viewers go so far as to extend this paradigm to children, who are typically understood to be
innocent and naïve, still learning the codes of morality? It's also interesting that this image is a
photograph, while the other images in the chapter are oil paintings. What statement might Berger
wish to make about the intrinsic "ways of seeing" in each medium? Because photographs are the
mass-reproducible medium sine qua non, the inclusion of a photo here is striking. Perhaps this
image represents a departure from the materialistic worldview that oil painting upheld—indeed,
this proposition is strengthened by the fact that the impoverished subjects we see in oil paintings
in Chapter 5 are all happy-looking, thrilled to serve the wealthy and aspiring to become them one
day, whereas this subject simply looks miserable. The oil painting of a child on the other side,
entitled Peasant Boy Leaning on Sill, further encourages this comparison. Although the title tells
us he is a peasant, the boy is smiling, seemingly unaffected by his disadvantaged social class. In
this spread, the distinction between photography and oil painting is thus made apparent, as
photography, with its mass reproducibility, departs from oil painting's emphasis on ownership
and complicity in the glorification of capitalism.

The next two pages are populated with numerous oil paintings, all of which depict domestic
scenes. In each of these paintings, the ideological function of oil painting that Berger discusses in
Chapter 5 is apparent: the lustrous, detailed renderings of the objects that outfit these paintings
make them seem almost possible to touch, and this tactile impression stirs in the viewer a desire
to possess them. The relationship between these images and the analysis from Chapter 5 is fairly
straightforward: so why then are two images printed directly on the fold between the pages?
Perhaps this is a commentary on reproducibility, harkening all the way back to Chapter 1. When
these images became reproducible—in this case, through the advent of the camera and printing
press—they were no longer limited to their original context, which, in this case, would likely
have been the home of a noble family. Liberated from the time and place they once occupied,
they can be harnessed to other ends, inserted into an argument, as Berger seems to do here. By
distorting the images through fracturing them, he could be said to counteract the ideology of the
oil painting tradition, ruining the paintings' sense of representational realism and thus limiting
their impact on the viewer's desire for possession.

The images of animals on the next two pages recall Berger's discussion of oil paintings of
livestock in Chapter 5. It appears that the animals in these paintings, whether dogs or horses,
were selected for their pedigrees. Just like an oil painting of a luxurious mansion or rich-looking
feast, the subject matter depicted here stands in for wealth, cataloging all the expensive things
one might own if one accumulated sufficient riches to buy them with. Only one painting on this
spread is absent of animals; in it, a noble-looking family poses against a beautifully groomed
natural landscape. In this image, it is their property that is on display. Just like Berger describes
in the previous chapter, this painting could be interpreted as a mere appreciation of nature; but in
fact it relies on the fact that this particular slice of nature belongs to the family depicted within it.
These paintings make clear that, within the logic of the oil painting tradition, there is nothing that
can't be possessed: not even things typically considered "wild," like horses or trees, defy
possession.
The final spread of the chapter offers numerous oil paintings, all depicting human subjects. The
first two on the left-hand page are both crowded scenes, representing the wealthy classes of two
distinct historical periods. On top is an image of a Roman feast; despite the reproduction of the
image being fairly small, numerous details emphasizing the feast's luxury still stand out. Below
that, a painting with a similar composition is reproduced, this time depicting a Parisian salon.
Both paintings depict gaiety, social success, and above all, wealth. The viewer, regarding these
images, can't help but feel a little left out--although unlike in still-life paintings, the subject
matter of these images isn't a series of objects to be possessed, the underlying ideology is still
one that privileges wealth.

On the bottom-left-hand page are two images of women, side-by-side. The woman on the left is
elaborately clothed in an exquisite dress; the one on the right is nude, her long hair cascading
behind her as she looks down at a male figure who reaches up towards her from within the
ocean. Of course, the nude woman recalls Berger's discussion of the female nude in Chapter 3,
and her placement in the painting—frontal, sprawled in an unnatural position that emphasizes her
sexual characteristics—confirms this. Interestingly, however, it appears that the male subject of
the painting is in peril, reversing the power dynamic seen in other paintings of female nudes
throughout the book. While the woman in this painting certainly appears, it seems she also acts,
gesturing towards the drowning man as though she is about to save him. The clothed woman in
the left-hand painting harkens back to the discussion of oil paintings in the previous chapter,
serving as an idealized figure of wealth and luxury. In this sense, both women are figured as
idealized, albeit in different ways: one upholds the values of capitalism, while one serves the
(typically male) viewer's sexual pleasure.

The right-hand side of the page offers four more paintings, all depicting nude women, although
their message is once again quite obscure. We could hazard a guess about the two top images,
whose titles—Witches Sabbath and The Temptation of St. Anthony—imply that the naked female
subjects are up to no good. Witches Sabbath appears to depart from the typical tradition of the
female nude, showing women in action, not necessarily configured for the spectator's visual
pleasure. However, given the painting's title, it seems that the message isn't one of
empowerment; rather, the only women to be depicted naked without overt sexualization are
witches. The Temptation of St. Anthony shows a woman engaged in a much different kind of
moral turpitude: she attempts to seduce a pious man, and, in doing so, also seems to tempt the
viewer. Unlike Witches Sabbath, The Temptation of St. Anthony is consistent with the tradition of
female nudes that emphasizes sexuality and makes it appear that the naked woman exists for the
viewer. In this sense, the viewer of this painting might identify with St. Anthony, taking on the
delusional belief that the seductive woman in the painting exists for him.

In the painting on the bottom-left side of this page, a nude woman, framed in ornate Greek
columns, undresses for a bath. She gazes at her reflection in the pool of water before her. This
recalls Berger's observation in Chapter 3 that the mirror, frequently employed as a symbol of
female vanity, is actually quite hypocritical: within the narrative of the painting, this woman is
narcissistic, yet what's truly narcissistic is the male painter's desire to paint her in the nude and
possess that nude, imagining that her state is for him. The final image in the chapter, on the
bottom right, seems to question the conventional female nude, though it's difficult to say exactly
how. The image is so small that its details are tough to make out, though the naked-looking
female figure on the left-hand side of the painting appears to be on fire. Several other subjects in
the painting—male passers-by—seem to go about their business without regarding her, unlike
the male subjects of typical female nudes that generally appear absorbed in the women before
them. On the other hand, perhaps the woman isn't on fire at all, but shrouded in a cloud;
nevertheless, those that surround her seem unperturbed by whatever dramatic event is occurring.
Is the spectator meant to mirror the men in the painting and walk on by? Again, the answer is
unclear, but when reproduced in proximity to all these other oil paintings of female nudes, it
encourages us to evaluate the ideological underpinnings of both traditions.

Ways of Seeing Summary and Analysis of Chapter 7

Summary

Turning now to the modern world, Berger sets aside the previous discussion of oil paintings to
look at advertising, or "publicity images." These images proliferate, surrounding us more densely
than any other kind of image at any previous point in history. Often, we don't really take in all
the ads that we see; we pass by them, they pass by us, they may not really register. But at least
momentarily, any ad that we look at does a kind of work on us: they make us want to buy things.
We accept the existence of this system as readily as we accept the climate around us, even
though it's rife with contradictions. For example, advertisements are always of the present in the
sense that we engage with them in a particular moment, but their content almost always refers to
the past or future. However, we can brush these contradictions aside because publicity is
generally justified under the assumption that it benefits the public, informing consumers so that
they can fully exercise their freedom of choice.

Berger questions this definition of "freedom": within a culture that privileges publicity, we are
free to choose which products to buy, but we are not free to choose not to buy. Advertisements
constantly persuade us to spend our money by positing that we will be transformed by the act of
purchase: spending our money will make us "enviable." Ads manufacture glamour by conveying
the happiness of others who have what we desire, capitalizing on our sense of envy to convince
us that we, too, will be glamorous (which is essentially the same as being enviable) if we buy
what they have. Since ads can't offer us the actual pleasure of the thing they're selling—an ad for
the world's best steak is still just a piece of paper, and can't literally facilitate the pleasurable
experience of eating that steak—they rely on a hypothetical future transaction that will bring us a
kind of pleasure completely divorced from real life. This pleasure could be described as the joy
of being envied by others, or the state of being glamorous. As you can see, it's far more abstract
than the actual pleasure or usefulness of a real thing to be enjoyed. When we look at an ad, then,
we are made to envy our hypothetical future selves—ourselves as we would exist if we were to
buy the product.

Berger briefly returns to his discussion from Chapter 5, positing a fundamental relationship
between ads and oil paintings. For one, advertisements often quote or reference oil paintings, in
order to lend themselves an air of cultural authority or luxury. Interestingly, these two values are
actually opposed to one another: cultural value is thought to be almost spiritual, independent
from the vulgarity of quantifiable transactions, yet luxury is by definition the domain of wealth.
But the relationship between ads and oil paintings runs even deeper: they share a similar visual
language, which Berger vivifies by reproducing a series of oil paintings side-by-side with a series
of ads. Both use similar symbols—female sexuality, the ocean, the "exotic"Mediterraneann,
romantic nature—in their address to the viewer. Berger suggests that this is not coincidental: oil
painting is fundamentally a celebration of private property, making it the ideal predecessor to
publicity images. Advertising is fundamentally nostalgic: since it can never fulfill its own claims,
it must instead sell you a glorified image of the past. In this sense, advertising recalls the
historical genre of oil painting, as Berger discussed in Chapter 5. Publicity images capitalize on
the average buyer's fleeting familiarity with art and history, borrowing famous symbols to lend
credibility to its images of glamour.

The continuity between advertising and oil painting is further explained by one particular
technical development: the invention of inexpensive color photography made it possible to
reproduce images of objects in extremely realistic depth and texture, much like oil painting
famously did in eras past. However, the spectator of an oil painting was historically likely to be
its owner, who already boasted enormous wealth, whereas the spectator of an ad is likely to be a
common person, both worker and buyer, caught up in the promise of trying to acquire wealth.

The purpose of ads is to make us dissatisfied enough with our current life that we'll buy
something, which also helps to explain why the interior spaces of the very rich are often devoid
of publicity in a way that the outside world rarely is. Advertising relies on our anxiety that, by
buying nothing, we will be nothing, feeding the idea that money is the constitutive building
block of all human relations. It promises a future in which we are glamorous, but this future is
endlessly deferred. This notion of glamour is unique to advertisements, and did not yet exist at
the time of oil painting: oil paintings may show their subjects as wealthy, beautiful, or loved, but
they inevitably lack the contemporary sense of glamour that derives from being envied by others.
Perhaps this is because they occupied a different place in society, reifying the power of their
already-wealthy viewers rather than engaging with the everyday citizen.

Advertisements make it seem as though the whole world is available to the consumer—but, in
doing so, they also flatten the world, rendering everything similar, as everything is universally
available in a marketplace. It produces a vision of a life beyond conflict, because it always takes
place in the future or past. There are no "events" in advertising; the narrative of an ad is replaced
by our imagination of what we will feel like when we finally own the thing. This helps explain
why it's so jarring to see ads next to important or serious news stories: the world is filled with
events of which ads are inevitably devoid.

With all these factors in mind, the power and influence of advertising are made extremely clear:
all needs, desires, and social relations are subsidiary to their power to make us consume. All
hopes are consolidated and made similar, simplified so they can be catered to by an ad's play on
our imagination. This is the logic of capitalism: the only imaginable satisfaction is the
satisfaction of consuming.

Analysis

After spending most of the book discussing paintings, which we primarily encounter in
specialized spaces like museums, Berger shifts the focus towards advertisements in Chapter 7,
which, as he points out, confront us more frequently than any other kind of image. In
contemporary capitalist society, the concentration of images is denser than ever before—and a
large number of these images are "publicity images," or ads, meant to sell a product. Sometimes,
it feels as though we're surrounded by such a large number of ads that we can hardly process
them all. But nevertheless, they register on our consciousness, even if briefly: as Berger puts it,
"the publicity image belongs to the moment," momentarily affronting us as we walk down the
street or turn the pages of a magazine. Similarly, they "belong to the moment" in the sense that
they must constantly be re-thought and updated. Anyone who's ever watched the Super Bowl can
speak to how true this is: advertisements constantly try to appear and be with the times by
featuring social media trends, contemporary political slants, or the recognizable celebrities of the
moment.

Yet, there's a contradiction implicit in the fact that advertisements "belong to the moment": their
images often refer either to the past or the future. However, this strange contradiction often goes
unnoticed as we passively accept the presence of ads surrounding us, moving around us like the
weather. This state of being surrounded by publicity images is usually justified under the premise
that it helps consumers stay informed about the litany of products that they might buy—in effect,
making possible our freedom of choice and freedom of enterprise. This, as Berger observes, is
why images of cities illuminated by ads and neon signs are often taken to symbolize "The Free
World." However, this freedom of choice is illusory: consumers are offered the choice between
which products to buy, but we don't really have the choice not to consume at all. As Berger puts
it, "publicity as a system only makes a single proposal": that we are fundamentally incomplete,
and can only enrich our lives by buying things to complete ourselves—that buying more things,
despite making us literally poorer, will somehow also make us richer.

So how do publicity images convince us of this ultimately false transformation? This is how the
earlier contradiction, about advertisements being "of the present" but frequently referring to the
past or future, comes in: ads show us people who have already apparently been transformed by
the act of consuming, and, resultantly, ought to be envied. "The state of being envied is what
constitutes glamour," writes Berger, "and publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour."
Sure, there is a certain pleasure to be had by buying and using or experiencing something that we
want—but advertising images don't deal in this realistic pleasure. Instead, they deal in a
hypothetical future pleasure that we might attain by buying what they tell us to, making us
acutely aware that we lack that particular pleasure in the moment we see them. In this sense,
publicity offers the prospective buyer "an image of himself made glamorous by the product or
opportunity it is trying to sell." When we see an advertisement, we project ourselves into it,
imagining the happiness we will feel when we have our new thing, and furthermore imagining
the envy that others will feel towards us, made newly glamorous by the acquisition of something
exciting. In this sense, advertising images rely on social relations to execute their mission of
making us consume.

Although this desire to be envied is socially relational, being envied is solitary--it depends on
posessing something exclusively, or "not sharing your experience with those who envy you."
This, says Berger, explains the absent, distant faces of models in so many glamorous ads: "they
look out over the looks of envy which sustain them." When we look at these ads, we are meant to
envy our hypothetical future selves: we imagine ourselves transformed by the product for sale,
envied by others. To rephrase, Berger offers a compelling aphorism: "the publicity images steals
[the buyer's] love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product."
Berger then posits a connection between advertising images and oil paintings. Often, this
connection is explicit, such as when ads reference famous paintings, or center on reproduction
and pastiche. By including well-known or historically important artworks, advertisements hope
to lend credibility to their own messages. By "quoting" famous art, ads denote affluence, but
furthermore, they bolster their own association with wisdom and dignity. Herein lies another
contradiction: an artwork referenced in an advertisement simultaneously denotes spirituality or
cultural heritage (values typically thought to be opposed to materialism) and wealth. But the
relationship between ads and oil painting runs even deeper: Berger points out that publicity
images rely heavily on the visual language of oil painting. He interrupts the essay with a series of
pictures, showing oil paintings and advertisements side-by-side. Beyond their striking formal
similarity, they share a series of common aims and devices: the gestures of their subjects,
romanticization of nature, innocence, the exotic, stereotypes of women, sexual emphasis on
female bodies, luxurious materials and textures, the ocean, men gesturing to denote their power
and virility, perspectival distance, alcohol, and men in cars and on horses.

Why do they share such a long list of common devices? Berger returns to his earlier discussion
of oil painting to help explain this: fundamentally, oil painting was a celebration of private
property, deriving from the principle that you are what you have. Publicity is essentially
nostalgic, relying on references to the past to obfuscate the fact that the products it sells can
never live up to their own claims. This sense of nostalgia is effectively accomplished by
referencing the kinds of art history that the average spectator might have learned about in school
and come to associate with wealth and luxury. These vague, glamorous references, "cultural
lessons half-learnt," turn history into myth, masking the inadequacies of the present. Thus,
publicity images need a visual language that is historically informed, making oil painting an
ideal analog. Finally, the invention of cheap color photography made it easy to reproduce the
tangibility, color, and texture of objects—precisely the tactile lustre that, previously, only oil
painting was able to capture. Both color photography and oil painting appeal to the spectator's
sense of acquiring the actual thing that the image refers to, by eliciting the feeling that the object
pictured is real enough to be touched.

However, the "spectator-buyer" of advertisements occupies a much different subject position

than the "spectator-owner" of oil painting. Oil paintings served to consolidate the owner's own
sense of their own value by showing the wealth they already enjoyed, embellishing and vivifying
the luxury of the way that they already live. Advertisements, on the other hand, work by making
the viewer somewhat dissatisfied with their life as it exists at present. This is because they rely
on the promise of a better alternative, which will easily remedy dissatisfaction for the small cost
of a new product. While oil paintings were for those who had already made money on the
market, ads are for those who constitute the market, both as workers and buyers. Berger
elucidates this opposition by pointing out that the only places relatively free of publicity images
are the domains of the already rich.

Publicity relies on anxiety. It posits that to have money is to overcome anxiety, and instructs us
to be anxious about having nothing and, by extension, being nothing. To have and spend money
is to access every human capacity, says Berger--"the power to spend money is the power to live."
This sense of power is always in the future tense. And yet, the achievement of some future state
in which we have overcome our anxieties and are finally glamorous, as promised by publicity
images, is endlessly deferred. So, then, why do we keep buying things even when we know, on
some fundamental level, that the promise of future power is a lie? Berger suggests that this is
because the truthfulness of an ad is judged by the relevance of its fantasies to the spectator's own.
As long as ads continue to successfully fulfill our daydreams, they don't have to be true to reality.

This returns us to the discussion of glamour that Berger began earlier in the chapter. He claims
that glamour is a modern invention—that, even in the heyday of oil painting, there was no such
thing as "glamour" in the way that we now understand it. Sure, there were grace, elegance, and
authority, but these are all still different: the subjects of oil paintings are not presented as
enviable, necessarily. Their qualities are their own, and are recognized as such: these subjects
can be beautiful, wealthy, fortunate, et cetera, but that isn't quite the same as being calculatedly
enviable and therefore glamorous. That is because these subjects do not depend upon others
wanting to be like them. Warhol's portrait of Marilyn Monroe, for instance, depends on the envy
of others to constitute its glamour in a way that oil painting never did.

Advertising images collapse the world by bringing it all before us: everything is on offer,
available for our consumption. And, since everything is imagined to offer itself to us, everywhere
is essentially the same. The world is flattened and made to appear free of conflict, because "to
 live beyond conflict" is understood as the highest form of sophistication, Berger says. Even
images of revolution are appropriated for advertisements, stripped of their radical politics and
made to appear fun and glamorous. Hence, there is a stark contrast between the sanitized
conception of the world that advertising offers us, and the world as it actually exists. This is
extremely evident in magazines that print news stories: images of global trauma and horror are
reproduced alongside warm, promising publicity images, to quiet the jarring effect. This
juxtaposition is so disarming because publicity images are essentially devoid of events: because
it must take place in the past or future to capitalize on our sense of envy, publicity must be
situated outside the present, excluding all narrative development. The act of acquiring something
replaces any other event that might take place in the temporal logic of an advertisement—in
essence, the exact opposite of the news. Here, the shortcomings of a culture saturated with
publicity images become extremely clear: ads recognize nothing besides the power to acquire
and consume. All hopes are gathered and instrumentalized under the mantle of consumption,
reducied to a simple equation: buy this, and you'll be happy. Amidst the cynicism of constant
war, violence, and tragedy, the satisfaction of consuming is the only kind of satisfaction that can
be envisioned. In this sense, ads impose a false sense of what is or isn't desirable, shoring up the
future of capitalism by forcing the population to define their interests as narrowly as possible—in
this case, within the requirement that they continually consume.

Ways of Seeing Symbols, Allegory and Motifs

The Modest Female Nude

One art-historical trope that Berger skillfully unpacks is the "modest" nude female. Renaissance art
in particular, with its emphasis on biblical stories such as the tale of Adam and Eve, tended to depict
naked women (alongside men), privates neatly covered by well-placed fig leaves. The women in
these paintings aren't ashamed of their nudity in relation to their surroundings—they appear to be
modest in relation to the spectator. As the tradition of painting female nudes developed,
modesty—or lack thereof—became a way of signaling the values or intentions of the women being
depicted. Some female nudes are self-consciously modest; others are aware of their provocative
immodesty as if winking to the spectator. In either case, however, their status is determined in
response to an imagined viewer: in short, female nudity is always self-aware, and a woman's
morality can be inferred from how she appears to respond to being seen naked. This, as Berger
points out, is obviously sexist: while men are endowed with a certain confrontational power, the
painted woman "is not naked as she is. She is naked as the spectator sees her." In this sense, an
imagined (male) spectator is baked into the painting itself, encoding the male-dominated relations
of a certain era into the very work of art.
The Luxurious Oil Painting
One of Berger's central propositions is that a seemingly innocuous choice, such as the choice of
what paint to use, can have ideological consequences. Oil painting is a clear example: because its
rich texture is well suited to depicting luxurious, expensive goods, oil painting formed a
representational tradition that emphasized the value of these expensive objects, and, by extension,
market capitalism. Consider the velvety, deeply pigmented, highly detailed physical objects in any
historical oil painting: the beauty of their representation valorizes them, making the acquisition of
material goods seem extremely desirable. In this sense, the oil painting is figured as a kind of
antecedent to the modern advertisement, emphasizing the glamour of acquiring more objects.
The Unique Original
Another central motif that Berger debunks is the rarefied, valuable original work of art. Although,
in this era of reproducible media like photography, no artwork is really "unique" (in the sense that
there will inevitably be innumerable pictures of it floating around—we've all seen photos of the
Mona Lisa even if we haven't seen the physical painting in person), original artworks are still
thought to have some unique value. Paradoxically, this is especially true of works that have been
reproduced a lot, because they are more famous, lending an almost religious value to the rare
originals. Drawing on the writings of Walter Benjamin, Berger suggests that this uniqueness is
illusory: and although a high-quality reproduction could look even better than an original painting,
the original commands higher market value due to some rarefied status that's essentially imagined.
Berger, after Benjamin, advocates for the destabilization of this imagined uniqueness by endorsing
mechanical reproduction as a way to democratize art, offering broader access and increased
possibilities for interpretation.
The Glamorous Advertisement
Another art historical trope that Berger addresses will certainly be familiar to all contemporary
readers: the "publicity image," or advertisement, which tells us that we will be happier than before
if we buy a new product. In this sense, advertising is essentially the process of manufacturing
envy—and to be envied is to be glamorous, explains Berger. So while we may know, on some level,
that buying a hot new product won't necessarily make us as happy as the people in the
advertisements appear to be, the visual language of advertising appeals to our sense of envy to
encourage us to keep purchasing.
Renaissance Perspective
Another convention that Berger addresses at some length is perspective. During the Renaissance, it
was discovered that, by painting physical space so that it appears to recede into a point on the
horizon, a more "realistic" image results. Since the perspective is fixed, these works presuppose a
single, fixed spectator—a way of seeing the world that, if you think about it, is actually not that
realistic at all. Rather than reproducing the way we actually move through the world, perspective
assumes a fixed, godlike spectator—another paradox, given that the religious beliefs of the time
dictated that God was omniscient and all-seeing. Like oil painting, perspective represents a
convention that wouldn't seem to be ideologically coded, but in fact is: perspectival paintings
appear to bring the world before the spectator, affirming a Cartesian worldview.

Ways of Seeing Metaphors and Similes

The Mechanical Eye (Metaphor)

As he explains the visual conventions of perspective, Berger quotes Dziga Vertov, a revolutionary
Soviet filmmaker:

"I'm an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it." (p. 17)

In Vertov's manifesto, he writes from the perspective of the camera, whose way of seeing differs
from human vision, revealing the world more perfectly than the flawed, fallible eye. Berger doesn't
include this quote to suggest that automated vision is preferable to human sight, but rather, employs
it to illustrate how the camera fundamentally changed humans' experience of the visual by capturing
isolated moments in time. Because of this newfound capacity, Renaissance perspective—where the
entire visual world converges on the eye of the beholder—fell out of style, no longer adequately
capturing a world that changes in time. Of course, neither Berger or Vertov is literally a
camera—rather, they write or quote from its perspective to vividly illustrate how photography
changed the field of human vision.
The Building's Memory (Metaphor)
Central to Chapter 1 is Berger's discussion of how mechanical reproducibility changes the meaning
of an image. To illustrate this, he harkens back to a time when images could only be seen in the
spaces for which they were designed, such as a painting on the wall of a Renaissance chapel.
Describing the status of these paintings, Berger writes:

"The images on the wall are records of the building's interior life, that together they make up the
building's memory." (p. 19)

Now, the building, being an inanimate object, does not have any actual memory. But this metaphor
illustrates the fact that, prior to the advent of mechanical reproduction, images were linked to the
spaces where they resided, and their fixed position in that space contributed to their rarity and
power. This is how he rephrases Walter Benjamin's concept of the aura, or the "here-and-now" of
an artwork: an unreproducible image derives its sense of uniqueness from the exact place and time
where it exists, because, unlike a photocopy or an email, it cannot leave that place and time.
The Means of Reproduction (Metaphor)
As Berger expands Walter Benjamin's discussion of mechanical reproducibility, he offers the
following metaphor:

"The means of reproduction are used politically and commercially to disguise or deny what their
existence makes possible." (p. 30)

After Marx, he uses the idea of the "means of reproduction" to describe the general capacity for
images to be recreated. Sure, there's no singular central copy machine that constitutes the literal
"means" of reproducing images—the "means of reproduction" stands in for the complicated set of
relations governing images' reproducibility. In this context, it basically means "the power to recreate
images," which, as he points out, too often resides exclusively in the hands of the powerful.
The Split Woman (Metaphor)
Before he delves fully into his examination of female nudes in paintings, Berger examines the
social status of women that persists in contemporary society:

"The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such
tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being split into
two." (p. 46)
While the conditions of gender inequality are certainly stifling, they (usually) aren't literally so bad
that women end up cut in half. Instead, what Berger means here is that women are forced to play a
double role, surveying themselves constantly—in a sense, they are always accompanied by their
own images of themselves, or the images of themselves that they believe they are projecting out
into the world. To put it differently, a woman's consciousness is split between the part of herself that
is surveyor and the part that is surveyed: her agency to act, and her awareness that she also appears.
Berger notes that the same is not true of men, who simply survey others without surveying
themselves, never feeling the same split-consciousness.
Display as Disguise (Metaphor)
A core argument that Berger makes in Chapter 3 is the distinction between "nude" and "naked":
while nakedness is a natural state existing in the world, nudity is constituted by a certain
relationship to a spectator: you can't be nude without being seen by others. To further explain this,
he writes:

"To be on display is to have the surface of one's own skin, the hairs of one's own body, turned into a
disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded." (p. 54)

Although a naked person and a nude person may look exactly alike, a certain transformation takes
place when the naked person becomes the object of a spectator's gaze. Berger vivifies this
transformation by suggesting that it involves having one's own skin turned into a disguise, even
though, in reality, the sense of being looked at doesn't cause any real physical change to take place.
The change, as it is perceptible in these artworks, has more to do with how the nude subject is
positioned in relation to the viewer: does their body face frontally outward, or appear contorted to
better serve the spectator's visual pleasure? If so, it's likely a "nude," in the sense that the subject's
own virtues or characteristics are suppressed in favor of their physical appearance, which caters to
the gaze of the viewer. This explains how one's own body can be "turned into a disguise": the
characteristics that would lend depth or identity to a painting are discarded in favor of a generic
representation onto which the viewer's fantasies can be easily projected.
A House of Paintings (Simile)
Describing the social implications of the European tradition of oil painting between 1500 and 1900,
Berger observes:
 "It is as though the collector lives in a house built of paintings. What is their advantage over walls
of stone or wood?" (p. 85)

In this simile, he likens paintings to the fundamental unit of private property: the house. While the
wealthy art collector may not literally live in a house made of paintings, his collection of oil
paintings serves a similar purpose to a luxurious home: it surrounds him, reminding him of his
wealth by showing him sights of what he can (and, often, already does) possess. They serve to
confirm the pride of the collector, upholding their wealth and propping up their positive
self-evaluations. So, while they're not the literal walls within which the collector lives, paintings
serve a metaphorically similar function in supporting their favorable views of themselves.
Advertisement: Thief of Satisfaction (Metaphor)
In Chapter 7, as Berger discusses how "publicity images" (advertisements) psychologically address
their viewers, he explains:

"The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the
product." (p. 134)

Being an inanimate object, an advertisement cannot literally steal anything from its viewer—but
this metaphor illustrates how an ad can, in an instant, make us feel dissatisfied with ourselves
because we lack a product we didn't even know that we wanted. This helps explain how an
advertisement encourages us to imagine our hypothetical future selves, made more glamorous by
the acquisition of a fun new thing: we envy these glamorous future visions of ourselves, depleting
our satisfaction with our lives as they currently are, absent the product we might choose to buy.

Ways of Seeing Essay Questions

​ 1
​ Explain the Renaissance idea of perspective. What is the inherent contradiction
in this idea? When and why did this convention begin to change?
During the Renaissance, the belief developed that reality could be represented most
faithfully by drawing the world as if it converged on a single point on the horizon.
This created the illusion of perspectival space, giving two-dimensional paintings and
 drawings the illusion of depth. Essentially, this means that the whole world
converges on the eye of the spectator who beholds a painting. However, this is
fraught with contradiction: the position of the spectator feels godlike, as the world
appears to exist to furnish their perception, yet they are necessarily fixed in one
place, unlike an omniscient or truly all-powerful god. Once the camera was
invented, the idea that perspective realistically rendered the world began to change,
as it became apparent that images also have a temporal dimension, which the
conventions of perspective do nothing to capture.
​ 2
​ Describe how representations of women throughout art history have reinforced
their marginalization.
As Berger posits, the fundamental difference between men and women's presence in
the world is that women are constantly asked to survey themselves, simultaneously
perceiving their images of themselves as they perceive the world around them, while
men's perception, judgment, and action is turned outward towards the world. This is
because of the misogynistic belief that women can be reduced to the qualities that
they project on the surface; or, to rephrase this, that women's personalities and
values can be read from their appearances. Berger states this difference concisely by
noting that "men act" while "women appear." This has been reinforced by the
tradition of the female nude, which depicted women as passive receptacles for the
spectator's sexual gaze, reduced and typified to a series of desirable features that
exist for the viewer's projection of a fantasy. This representational tradition denies
women any attributes beyond what can be seen on the surface, reinforcing the idea
that their entire being resides in their appearance.
​ 3
​ What is the relationship between envy and glamour? How is it employed in
advertising?
According to Berger, advertisements work by encouraging us to envy a vision of our
future selves, which we assume will be happier because we are enjoying a new
product. Thus, it could be said, ads manufacture glamour: glamour is distinct from
wealth, beauty, or respect in the sense that it is by definition the state of being
 envied. Since ads always refer to a hypothetical past or future, they operate on envy,
locating happiness as perpetually outside the present.
​ 4
​ How is oil painting related to private property?
Oil painting, especially in the traditional way it was employed in Europe between
1500 and 1900, is noted for its lustrous, textured quality that makes the objects it
depicts appear almost real. The sense of tangibility that it creates encourages the
viewer to want to hold its objects, which extends into a desire to possess them. In
this sense, as Berger puts it, oil painting reduces everything to the equality of
objects. It posits that the only value of an object is its materiality, a point of view
that upholds capitalist property relations: its luminous, detailed representations of
expensive objects imply that it is good to acquire private property and luxurious
consumer goods. Thus, these paintings help prop up their owners' sense of
self-worth, reassuring them that property ownership is virtuous.
​ 5
​ How does reproduction change an image?
Although a perfect reproduction of an image might look exactly the same as the
original, there's something ontologically different about the fact that the original is
no longer unique. Before mechanical reproduction, images only existed in the
specific contexts for which they were created, meaning they were often only seen by
a select few people. Reproduction makes it possible for images to be re-printed an
disseminated widely, reaching a wider viewership and becoming interpreted more
diversely. However, their meaning can also change based on how they are
reproduced: they can be cropped, accompanied by text, or commented on in ways
that influence their interpretation, making them even more distinct from the original.
The original's meaning also changes, as an artificial sense of holiness is often
instated to compensate for the loss of uniqueness: we are told that seeing the original
Mona Lisa should inspire some sense of awe that transcends simply the painting's
historical or monetary value, akin to religiosity or inexplicable metaphysical value