This could be taken for a political meaning, because certain cultures and peoples have been oppressed over time and prevented from truly exploring their past. He mentions that people who have been denied this right have been denied freedoms. To imply Berger “situating” us in history explains that he has taken us to the creators of artworks and gotten us to really think about their true motivations in producing them.
If Berger has not “discovered” the past, then he has either completely misinterpreted the paintings about which he has written, or he has advanced our thoughts and opinions for the better by evoking new questions and ideas about art.
#John berger ways of seeing camera free#
It is hard to understand pieces of art of you cannot allow your mind to become free and to go back in time to understand feelings of those artists. He writes, “The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. It is bad, Berger teaches us, to over-analyze works and “mystifying” them. Negatively, therefore, we may adapt paintings to modern-day society and completely miss their meanings. Positively, pictures from the past can help us to understand the artists’ feelings throughout their lifetimes however, our viewpoints are constantly changing. If I had to define history based on its use in this essay, I would probably come up with something like: “history is a collaboration of many people’s feelings and interpretations of life, leading up to present day.” The relation Berger shows between the past and the present, is one that holds both positive and negative aspects. Paintings can also “take us back” to places throughout history. In its travels, its meaning is diversified” (p. Berger explains, “Because of the camera, the painting now travels to the spectator rather than the spectator to the painting. Also over time, the ways in which we view pictures has changed, through things such as the invention of the camera. Over time, it becomes more difficult to fully grasp the painter’s original feelings and intents when painting the piece. It is relevant to pictures, because people’s perspectives on viewing the pictures is constantly changing. History, in this sense, stands for art’s authenticity over time. This is relevant to the charts which Berger intersperses in his writing about how different classes of people interpret museums. He even ends his Ways of Seeing by stating, “A people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or class than one that has been able to situate itself in history” (p. Berger tends to pay a lot of attention to the relation between art and history. This is the paradox photography presents us with.1. This fabricated hype “which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependant upon their market value, has become a substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible.” (23) On the other hand, reproduction has afforded the lower class the ability to appreciate artwork never before at their disposal. The sway of money and our intellect are intrinsically connected, which unveils why art has evolved as something preserved for the wealthy. Moreover, the value of the work is affirmed not by its meaning, but by it’s market value.
We have been conditioned to embrace original works of art with the mindset: it is “authentic and therefore it is beautiful” (21). To be graced with the opportunity to visit the Louvre and stand before the painting in the flesh, one will realize that the meaning “no longer lies in what it uniquely says but in what it uniquely is” (21). The “Mona Lisa,” for lack of a better example, has been printed exorbitant number of times, and thus “its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings” (19).
The countless paintings lacing the walls of museums from Paris to New York are regarded in a different light. Berger illustrates how the onslaught of reproduction, in a sense, perverted the meaning of original works of art. The invention of the camera facilitated the means of mass-producing a single image. However, this is but a thread in a tapestry of reasoning rendering the repercussions photographs have had on our culture. This marked a turning point in our history, enabling humanity to view “the art of the past as nobody saw it before” (16). All of a sudden, “the visible…became fugitive” (18). However, the facility to steal fragments of time and space viciously veered the way man perceived the world. Before photography, the human eye was regarded as “the vanishing point of infinity” (18). John Berger’s essay, “Way of Seeing” dissects the camera’s sway in our society and the repercussions of reproduction.
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