67 pages • 2 hours read
John BergerWays Of Seeing
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1972A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary
This chapter is composed entirely of uncited reproduced images: paintings, photographs, and sculptures. Most of the images are of women. The photographs range in style and purpose. Some appear to be soft-core porn, some are documentary-style, and some are advertisements. The reproduced images also cover a wide range of historical periods, appearing to range from Renaissance, to early modern, to contemporary. One page also has what appear to be contemporary editorial photographs of food.
Chapter 2 Analysis
Here, Berger indulges a somewhat puzzling penchant for reproducing artwork, advertisements, and photography without citations, and without any written contextualization. Perhaps, by openly flouting academic conventions, he means to render these artworks more accessible. Another possible interpretation of this style of presentation (in which written language is totally absent) is that he means to foreground his reader’s inherent facility with visual languages. For Berger, this facility is inherent because of his audience’s presumed status as a subject of Western capitalism, and the primacy of the visual as an arbiter of both ideology and articulation.
In function, this collection of images of women, from a myriad of historical periods, primes his audience for the proceeding chapter’s content, and also activates the almost subliminal gender ideology and messaging that he will explore in that chapter.
