John Berger ESSAY

‘Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak.’

Based on the BBC television series, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing was praised by many critics although to me his theories were hard to follow. The book alters out perceptions of the things around us, and the way we look at a work of art; it gets you to ask questions. When thinking about the many points Berger makes in relation to the artist images I have chosen, it is quite difficult to look back and question why I chose them; what made me chose that particular image out of a gallery full of others?

The starting point of my project is my holiday homework, which is based around the Ernest Hébert oil painting Girls of Alvito. I found this image when visiting the Musee d’Orsay in the ‘Italian Models: Hébert and the Peasants of Latium’ exhibition. Starting my project w

ith a painting I physically saw has made a big difference because the feelings and aesthetic features that made me choose it are what I look for in other artist images, and when taking photos. When I first saw the painting being used to advertise the exhibition, I thought it was a nice piece and it did prompt me to go to the gallery , but in person everything looked ten times better; the colours, the cliffs, the layers of clothing, the hair, the piercing eyes. The detailed simplicity of the image stops you in your tracks; the girls in the painting make you question the story behind it- why did Hébert choose to paint them? And with such exhausted expressions? To me, the girls in themselves

have the power of making viewers stop and stare purely because their eyes feel like they’re looking right through you, as if they are numbed of all expression and feeling.

Berger said that ‘the past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.’ Although it may have a simpler meaning, I interpret this to mean that this beautiful piece is the well in which I will take from, the feelings it provokes and what makes me gaze at it. Thus the features that made Girls of Alvito special helped me to find other pieces that I can move my project forward with. After reading Ways of Seeing, to say I chose these other images because they were beautiful and related to Girls of Alvito seems far too simple. In the first of many essays that makes up Berger’s book, he says’ The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.’ It is one of many statements in the book that he makes that when put into context are true. To say, in relation to one of my other artists work for example, that Edmund Dulac’s Scheherezade is just a beautiful drawing would underestimate its appeal once you know that it was used as a part of the illustrations in a children’s story book, which gives it that magical charm.