Ways of Seeing - Ways of Seeing

wSerie
TV Shows
Ways of Seeing
Season 1

John Berger's Ways of Seeing changed the way people think about painting and art criticism. This watershed work shows, through word and image, how what we see is always influenced by a whole hose of assumptions concerning that nature of beauty, truth, civilization, form, taste, class and gender. Exploring the layers of meaning within oil paintings, photographs and graphic art, Berger argues that when we see, we are not just looking - we are reading the language of images.

Ways of Seeing: Season 1 - 4 Episode s

1x1 - Psychological Aspects
January 8, 1972
The first part of the television series drew on ideas from Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction arguing that through reproduction an Old Master's painting's modern context is severed from that which existed at the time of its making.
1x2 - Women in Art
January 15, 1972
The second film discusses the female nude. Berger asserts that only twenty or thirty nudes in the European oil painting tradition depict a woman as herself rather than as a subject of male idealisation or desire.
1x3 - Collectors and Collecting
January 22, 1972
The third programme is on the use of oil paint as a means of depicting or reflecting the status of the individuals who commissioned the work of art.
1x4 - Commercial Art
January 29, 1972
In the fourth programme, on publicity and advertising, Berger argues that colour photography has taken over the role of oil paint, though the context is reversed. An idealised potential for the viewer (via consumption) is considered a substitution for the actual reality depicted in old master portraits.

Ways of Seeing: All seasons

S1: Ways of Seeing
4 Episode s

1x1 - Psychological Aspects

1x2 - Women in Art

1x3 - Collectors and Collecting

1x4 - Commercial Art

S1: Ways of Seeing