Study Guide: Ways of Seeing

This page presents summaries, key terms, and  study questions for John Berger's Ways of Seeing. The selections presented here are intended to focus on your reading on the themes that are most important for our course.

You should be able to explain Berger's use of the following "key terms" in your own words and to give examples that clarify your explanation. You should be able to recognize the key images and explain the reasons that  Berger included them in his book.

Key Quotations

You should be able to write a paragraph that explains the following quotations in your own words and that gives examples which support and clarify your explanation.

• "The way in which we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe" (8).
• "We only see what we look at" (8).
• "Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph" (10).
• "According to usage and conventions that are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man" (45). 
• "[A] way of seeing the world, which was ultimately determined by new attitudes to property and exchange, found its visualization in the oil painting, and could not have found it in any other visual art form" (87).
• Oil painting "defines the real as that which you can put your hands on" (88).
• "Publicity relies to a very large extent on the language of oil painting" (135).
• "You are what you have" (139).
• "Colour photography is to the spectator-buyer what oil paint was to the spectator-owner" (140).
• "Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy" (149).

commentary © Virginia Bonner, 2003