John Berger's 'Ways of Seeing'

Since its publication in 1972, John Berger's 'Ways of Seeing' has remained influential because it doesn't simply analyse images—it unsettles how weunderstand the act of looking itself. Berger begins with the idea that "seeing comes before words," a line that seems simple but has far-reaching consequences. We encounter the world visually long before we describe it, which means that by the time language arrives, our seeing has already been shaped by experience, ideology, and expectation. The essay asks us to pay attention to that shaping.

Throughout the text, Berger shows that images are never neutral. A painting, a photograph, an advertisement—each contains a particular way of seeing, a viewpoint that directs how we are meant to look. Reproduction intensifies this. Once an artwork is lifted out of its original context and circulated through books, screens, and digital feeds, it becomes another image among many. Scale collapses, colours shift, and the environment of viewing changes. He argues that this mobility gives images a new kind of power, but also uproots them from the context that once anchored their meaning. A reproduced painting is not the same painting. It is a new object with a new function. This argument feels almost poetic now, when artworks circulate faster on screens than in museums.

Berger's writing on the gaze remains one of the most cited aspects of the book. In traditional Western art, women are often positioned to be looked at rather than to look back. "Men act and women appear" becomes a concise way of naming this inherited visual logic. It isn't only about gendered representation but about power: who is permitted to be an active subject, and who is framed as an image to be interpreted, owned, or desired.

This notion of desire also links classical painting to modern advertising. Berger argues that both forms organise looking around aspiration. Oil painting frequently displayed objects of wealth such as land, possessions, bodies, as symbols of ownership. Advertising continues this structure but updates it. Instead of confirming what someone owns, it promises what someone could be. Images persuade by constructing a gap between the viewer and an imagined, improved version of themselves.

What keeps 'Ways of Seeing' relevant today is its insistence that perception is not innocent. Our ways of seeing are formed through repetition, social conditioning, and visual environments we move through. Becoming aware of this doesn't necessarily free us from it, but it creates a space for resistance. We can ask what an image expects from us, what kind of viewer it assumes, and what desires it quietly shapes. Berger ultimately offers a practice of looking—one that slows down perception, questions the familiar, and acknowledges that every image carries an argument about how the world should be seen. To engage with his work is to recognise that seeing is never passive and that alternative ways of seeing are always possible.

• John Berger, “Ways of Seeing by John Berger,” www.ways-of-seeing.com, 1972, https://www.ways-of-seeing.com.