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Text appears only occasionally to attribute paintings and photographs, and not every image is attributed.
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In the second essay, all of the images are related. Throughout the first essay in the book Berger draws heavily on work by Walter Benjamin to explain how reproduction changes what images mean by circulating them in new ways and alongside new ideas breaking down rarified narratives handed down from elite which often seek stabilize our understanding meanings From this premise Berger explains how images have layers deeper meaning beyond what they show on the surface they can offer a valuable document of how their creator saw the world but their underlying politics can also be obscured or mystified in order to uphold powers that be. Another way of phrasing this: all images are encoded with ideology regardless if their creators consciously want them to be. This term is used to describe paintings, photographs, films or any other representation that humans can construct and it’s assumed that every image externalizes its creator’s way of seeing. One way to recreate our way of perceiving the world is through images. John Berger opens his seminal text Ways of Seeing with an observation that seems counterintuitive, considering its status as a written text: that, as we inhabit the world, we constantly perceive it, only later naming the things we see. Let that not, though, diminish Berger's achievement in highlighting what is a very clear gender bias in European art.1-Page Summary of Ways Of Seeing Overview
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These factors interplay in subtle ways, meaning that the icons of visual culture will mean different things to different people at different times. Overlaying this is the way visual culture is perceived by an audience. The whole is rather more than the sum of the parts we must see the artist in isolation (as with the Edvard Munch example previously) but also the artist as part of a wider society. Is a theory of the way of seeing actually telling us much about the work itself? Berger presents the portrayal of nude women in some of the works he highlights as 'feeding the appetite' of scopophilic male viewers but that seems too sweeping a generalisation not all viewers will see it that way (even if it was intended) art works are not simply a product of society, any more than they are simply a product of an artist. The ideological approach says much about Berger, but does it say much about the works of art he uses in his argument. The approach is prescriptive rather than descriptive (Howells and Negreiros, 2012). It is then that Berger's work is seen as polemical rather than analytical. The problems arise when one stops to think about what one does with the conclusion. Berger's treatise is the more effective for being straightforward with direct and lucid use of language. Berger lays bare the implied sexism in the art of the nude from Renaissance onwards, and we have seen this has not changed, perhaps even less subtle than in previous generations. At one level it seems almost uncontentious now as much of contemporary visual culture openly objectifies and debases women, as described in the post Gendering the Gaze.