This study guide for Ways of Seeing by John Berger looks at the key concepts and main ideas to help you get a deeper understanding of Ways of Seeing. Michael Rock is a New York-based graphic designer and partner at 2x4. Main ideas and takeaways about John Berger's Ways of Seeing. In so doing he presages the development of the playlist as a predominant contemporary form and creates one of the first pre-digital books.
#JOHN BERGER WAYS OF SEEING OUTLINE SERIES#
But Berger also adds two entirely visual essays: a series of examples that by the power of selection and juxtaposition alone makes his thesis. There are five text-and-image essays on everything from Renaissance nudes to modern advertising. Reflecting its origin as a televisual experience, the text and images work simultaneously, one leveraging the other. The entire text is in bold sans serif, broken down into short paragraphs coupled with visual examples. The essay text starts on the cover, giving the book both a certain modesty (fewer pages) and an urgency (read it now!). Ways of Seeing by John Berger is a seminal text based on the 1972 BBC series of the same name, which explores the role of art in western civilization and how it has shaped how the world is seen. Thus in The Primitive and the Professional, Berger notes how these two terms stigmatize and valorize. Shortly after it aired, Berger and designer Richard Hollis produced a printed version of the series published by Pelican Books-a slim, 5-inch-by-8-inch paperback with only 166 pages and both black and white ink on uncoated paper-an imprint dedicated to education. Berger presents an analysis of our cultural relationship to art and advertising, arguing that high art is characterized by subliminal themes of male dominance. John Berger asks in the first of 23 brief essays.
Ways of Seeing was a four-part BBC television series written by critic John Berger. While the digital may be destabilizing print, it is interesting to consider the reverse scenario: print stabilizing digital.