In his work, Ways of Seeing, Berger exhibits the idea that an individual’s vision of things is dictated by the person’s beliefs as well as knowledge. For instance, the way women were seen during the century Berger lived was portrayed in the various pictures and drawings of the period. For example, the presence of a man wholly depends on his embodies power while a woman’s presence portrays the attitude she has towards herself, which also defines the things that she can or cannot be put through in her life. The author argues that the presentation of a woman in a drawing with a mirror suggests that as men look at them, they tend to watch themselves as the men look at them.
The author elaborates on the idea of the ubiquity of imagery in which women are depicted as gullible to the advertisements brought forth by various companies in as much as they are exaggerated and some bit of lies are incorporated. For instance, clothing, jewelry as well as beauty products companies will use a woman's image or picture in their advertisement. These adverts will suggest that the use of the product in the market will lead to automatic satisfaction as well as happiness, which is not usually the case but the women will still be swayed because of these adverts and the images of women depicted to be happy and smart after using the products.
Notably, Berger's work explains some of the experiences in the world today like the most of the adverts are done by ladies who are mostly attractive because a significant percentage of women have the perception of being used, and secondly is because they will attract both the fellow women who will want to be the same as what they see as well as men who are most of the time impressed by women other than fellow men. Further, the perception of an individual as the author says dictates how the person sees things in the world today. For instance, if a person is raised by an abusive father, the individual tends to hate every male at first sight because of their experiences in the past.
Markedly, one of the issues I would wish to examine is the difference between nudity and nakedness. According to Berger, nakedness is being oneself while nudity is being seen and recognized as an object by others. Again, the author uses a drawing where both a man and a woman have no clothes but insinuates that the woman is seen as nude while the man is seen to be naked. This perception could be explained in different ways first of which is the fact that women were considered and considered themselves to be objects in the previous centuries. Another reason could be the fact that most of the time men see what is interesting in the women. Therefore, the pictures and drawings of the women usually are frontal either metaphorically or literally.
In conclusion, the author gives the idea that artwork or photograph and the various notions like truth, beauty as well as genius are given different meanings according to the perception, beliefs as well as knowledge of the individuals seeing these things. He indicates that sometimes what the person sees may go beyond mere word explanations and can only be drawn, like the inequality and the imbalance that existed between men and women in the society, an example he uses in the text to criticize the inequality.
Work Cited
Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing (p. 166). Port Melbourne: Thorpe.
