Ways of Seeing

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