In January, MTC read John Berger et al. Ways of Seeing (1972). Below is an informal and necessarily incomplete record of our thinking together.
Farah Bakaari: In January MTC read John Berger et al. 1972 classic Ways of Seeing in association with our forum on “The Gaze.” Our conversation, which was attended by a wide range of folks from undergraduate students and graduate students to professors and brilliant non-academic professionals was quite energizing, varied, and playful. One of my favorite parts of the Ways of Seeing are the essays in images precisely because I find their lack of captions and guides intimidating but also expansive. I loved reading Samuel P. Catlin’s essay on the pedagogical power of Berger for this very reason.
In the spirit of the book, we invited our reading group participants to submit their entries to our collective reading journal in word or in image (or both!).
I found the following print at flea market in Trumansburg, NY one summer afternoon and have yet to follow through my plan of hanging it somewhere in my house.
The caption reads: “In the sunken garden, Jean Colleran, Peggy Lloyd (see cover) and Betty Jane Hess, clad in bathing suits, interpret the classic group pose of the Three Graces, statues at the left. The girls, who made their living as models before they came to Hollywood, were delighted at this chance to compare their modern charms with those of three late 18th Century Italian models.”
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Omid Bagherli: I am a shooter for Ways of Seeing (1972). Fifty years later, the text still finds its target. While I was reading, the minimalist, bold prose seemed to ask me to look for more than what my eyes could see on the page, and I believe I did. My favorite section was on pp.109-110, where Berger et al. really let the cannons fly:
We are arguing that if one studies the culture of the European oil painting as a whole, and if one leaves aside its own claims for itself, its model is not so much a framed window open on to the world as a safe let into the wall, a safe in which the visible has been deposited (109).
It’s so simple, direct, and combative! If one were in danger of forgetting or recoiling from this central claim, then Ways of Seeing leaves a sly, humorous reminder—a parting shot—on the page after its final essay, which I think should be read as the book’s artistic statement. Here, Berger et al. reproduce Magritte’s “On the Threshold of Liberty” (1937), which nicely mirrors the first painting they reproduce, Magritte’s “The Key of Dreams” (1927).
But what’s important to me is how Ways of Seeing uses this image. First, it echoes the above claim. Second, it identifies with the black cannon. It offers a symbolic assault on the idea of “the framed window open on the world,” which, in Magritte’s rendering, is plainly a deception. The sky is just one panel among many– it sits alongside a nude, a landscape, and a surreal pattern in an anonymous room. It’s not clear what lies beyond the image of the sky—neither the painting or Ways of Seeing tells us that—but at least we realize that image-systems create the mind’s eye of the world, and that realities can be derealized through a different (and better) framing of the world’s images. With a slight shift, one can plainly discern a grand deception in the history of European painting.
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Charline Jao: The second half of Ways of Seeing really struck me this time around. I suspect that this is because I am watching Mad Men for the first time, but also because I think that Berger has only become more and more right about the ways that publicity makes us think we have infinite choices when we really have very little. There was some great conversation about how we think of Berger and our media landscape now. To be a 19th-century person, I just wanted to provide a quick look backward and plug Teresa Goddu’s Selling Antislavery, which is about the history of the American Anti-Slavery Society and how it created a mass market that was crucial to shaping middle-class culture. Goddu’s description of an antebellum consumer identity where “moral capital can be increased through material ownership” and consumption is the “most powerful form of freedom” seem, to me, to speak really directly to a current cultural atmosphere, where we are inundated with an abundance of supposed progressive messaging that ultimately boils down to the consumer as hero. Like Berger says, “Publicity can translate even revolution into its own terms.” Don’t fall for it!
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Jay Shelat: One of my favorite paintings is Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez. In particular, I love the multiple focalizations happening throughout. It immediately provokes so many questions about the purpose of art and how we understand it socially and politically. How can the various focalizations tell us about power dynamics? What role does the artist play within this social dynamic? The viewer? Berger’s book introduces us to these ideas so cogently. In that way, I think Ways of Seeing is a tremendously useful pedagogical tool—one that allows us, the viewer/reader, to play with and question what we know, how we know it, and why we know it. What more can we ask from a book? What more can we ask from a painting?
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Bekah Waalkes: Left: Abraham Mignon, “Still life with fruit, a lobster and a goldfinch” (1670-1679). Center: “Nature morte aux oranges (II)” by Henri Matisse (1899). Right: “Office Lunch” by Bekah Waalkes (2025).
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Lauren Wilke: Left: “Young Woman at a Table” by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1887). Right: A selfie by me (2025).
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Laura Hartmann-Villalta: On this reading of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing—a fundamental text for me as a visual culture scholar and one I usually teach once a year in my first-year writing class—I found myself struck by one sentence in particular: “In lived sexual experience nakedness is a process rather than a state” (60). In these few sentences, I’ve teased out why it gripped my attention.
In the preceding pages, Berger has been discussing the European tradition of nudes, and he argues that “sexual-protagonist” of the painting is the “spectator-owner looking at it” (easy enough, though the phrase “spectator-owner” needs its own close-reading and certainly has a long theoretical thread in visual culture studies) – though this type of painting would evolve into grand public paintings that “men of state, of business” negotiated under (56-57). And when this important man found himself defeated, he could look up and “[w]hat we saw reminded him that he was a man” (57). [barf]
It is sentences like these that make me resist Berger as a possible feminist visual theorist, which was a question raised in our discussion group. Granted, he is setting up an imagined scenario in order to move the reader into the particularity of nakedness in contrast to nudes, his next topic. Could that sentence, then, its stylistic emphasis on manliness, be cheekiness? Perhaps…because what comes next, when informed by my opening phrase, surprised me by its emphasis on female agency and subjectivity.
Not talking about reading images at all, Berger mentions “the possibility of the shared subjectivity of sex” and how “[t]he loss of mystery occurs simultaneously with the offering of the means for creating a shared mystery. The sequence is: subjective – objective – subjective to the power of two” (59). In short, having read this chapter many times and in doing so, I thought about nudes, the male gaze, voyeurism, subjectivity – I suddenly found myself tracing out…*gasp*…what Berger thinks about sex—not in images, but off the page. Berger is leading the reader up to a “lived sexual experience” in which there is a “shared mystery” with a subjectivity “to the power of two.” My goodness, I thought. In these sneaky pages, was Ways of Seeing…Ways of Sex?
After each MTC reading group, we ask our participants to contribute to our collective reading journal, an informal and necessarily incomplete record of our thinking together. You can find our upcoming reading groups here, and if you will like to lead a reading group for us, please get in touch at editorial@mid-theory.com