He advanced the idea that the realistic, ‘highly tactile’ depiction of things in oil paintings and later in colour photography (in particular where they were portrayed as ‘within touching distance’), represented a desire to possess the things (or the lifestyle) depicted ( ibid. He noted that ‘almost all post-Renaissance European sexual imagery is frontal - either literally or metaphorically - because the sexual protagonist is the spectator-owner looking at it’ ( ibid. Ways of Seeing Berger adds that at least from the seventeenth century, paintings of female nudes reflected the woman’s submission to ‘the owner of both woman and painting’ ( ibid. Berger argues that in European art from the Renaissance onwards women were depicted as being ‘aware of being seen by a spectator’ ( ibid. Women watch themselves being looked at’ (Berger 1972, 45, 47). Ways of Seein g, Lecture In Ways of Seeing, a highly influential book based on a BBC television series, John Berger observed that ‘according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome - men act and women appear.
Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.” (p. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. John Berger on Gendered Looking Relations “ One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972) Written by a British novelist, art critic, and painter Based on a highly influential BBC mini-series Examines the operation of ideology in Western art history and visual culture Gendered Looking Relations Gender Studies G205 Week 10 John Berger – Ways of Seeing