Those whom never heard John Berger before, I highly recommended to watch all the episodes first then read the book.
John Berger died at the age of 90 but before he came up with the idea of popular understanding of art and the visual images on us.
Mr. Berger’s intention was to upend what he saw as centuries of elitist critical tradition that evaluated artworks mostly formally, ignoring their social and political context, and the series came to be seen as an assault on the historian Kenneth Clark’s lofty “Civilisation,” the landmark 1969 BBC series about the glories of Western art.
The work is actually perfect fit to our main idea in this blog. What they show; what they want us to think and feel; what kind of people they want us to be.
“Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations… It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.”
Lately in our generation with media they are/we are teaching what is woman, what woman should do and not to do. What is man, what man should do and not to do. Nudity becomes weakness so they are targetting the biggest weakness to turn people into sheeples.
THE FACTS, they say, the facts that what is normal for human being and what is abnormal, odd. When you look back into history you will see the same ideology but less technology. They came up with art, religion, tradition, culture, nationality to separate people and give all the informations through with sources that we daily use.
An art.
I have some red lined quotes that I wanna share from book:
“We explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact we are surrounded by it.”
“We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.”
“Alternatively one can forget about the quality of the reproduction and simply be reminded, when one sees te original, that is a famous paiting of which somewhere one has already seen a reproduction.”
“The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
After Adam and Eve story: “What is striking about this story? They became aware of being naked because, as a result of eating the apple, each saw the other differently. Nakedness was created in the mind of the beholder. The second strinking fact is that the woman blamed and is punished by being made subservient to the man. In relation to the woman, the man becomes the agent of God.”
“To be naked is to be without disguise. To be on display is to have the surface of one’s own skin, the hairs of one’s own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded. The nude is condemned to never being naked.”
“Our relief is the relief of finding an unquestionable reality to whose direct demands our earlier highly complex awareness must now yield.”
“Today the attitudes and values which informed that tradition are expressed through other more widely diffused media- advertising, journalism, television.”
“The feminine is different from the masculine- but because the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him.”
“The poor can be seen in the street outside or in the countryside. Pictures of the poor inside the house, however, are reassuring. ”
“Publicity is effective precisely because it feeds upon the real… Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure. But it cannot offer the real object of pleasure and there is no convincing.”
“Publicity is the culture of the consumer society.”
YOU ARE WHAT YOU HAVE“All publicity works upon anxiety.”
“Publicity in creasingly uses sexuality to sell any product or service. But this sexuality is never free in itself; it is a symbol for something presumed to be larger than it: the good life in which you can buy whatever you want. To be able to buy is the same thing as being sexually desirable; occasionally this is the explicit message of publicity. If you are able buy this product you will be loveable. If you cannot buy it, you will e less loveable.”
Another book from him, A Seventh Man. It is a seminal exploration of migrant workers. Actually based on 1970s time period Turkish migrant workers in Germany.
“A photograph of a boy in the rain, a boy unknown to you or me. Seen in the darkroom when making the print or seen in this book when reading it, the image conjures up the vivid presence of the unknown boy. To his father it would define the boy’s absence.”
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