Response to "Ways of Seeing"

            In his article “Ways of Seeing”, John Berger attempts to show readers that there is more than one way to see things. He says that you can look at things for how they are put but you can also see why they are put that way and how they are put that way.

            This relates to “Argument as Conversation” and “Vocabulary of Comics”. All of these articles are telling us that things are not always what they seem. They go from breaking social norms (arguments as negative), breaking constructs of images (a pipe is not a pipe, it’s a painting, and drawing, it’s an icon), to the actual inner workings of seeing something in a different way (women as nude compared to naked).

            I found this article a little bit confusing at first. I wasn’t quite sure where Berger was going with it. Once he described the difference between nude and nakedness it started to click. It’s really interesting to look at images of women in advertising and understand why they are posed certain ways now.

Before you Read

            If I were to draw a picture of a woman, I would make her face the viewer. This is because you can put a lot of emotion into facial expressions and add more to the painting. I would put her in a room with typical furniture in the room, couch, dresser etc. I think if one is to draw a woman naked that it could add more artistic expression, so I would draw her naked.

Questions for Discussion and Journaling

1.)

            I do think that the artists of these paintings knew what they were doing, and they did it because they knew what they wanted to see and what other men wanted to see. And Berger would definitely agree with this.

2.)

            A lot of advertisements have posed women in them, and they seem to be posed in a way that captures men’s attention, kind of in the same way as the images used by Berger. This is because our portrayals of women haven’t changed much and the fact that the majority of men seem to be at the top of households. If you catch a man’s attention you capture the household’s attention, and this would get companies more money when used in advertisements.

3.)

            I think the assumptions made comparing men and women’s presence is not much different than they were when this article was published. It still seems to me that men, in the majority of our culture, make most decisions.

4.)

            The audience seems to be males. The way that Berger words the article would suggest this, words such as identifying men as “men” and when he talks about women he says “she”.

5.)

            I think the “other” is the woman’s actual self, her un-objectified person. With this change in perspective we no longer objectify the woman, but we look at her as another person. This takes the ‘fantasy’ aspect away from the image.

Applying and Exploring Ideas

1.)

            There are some advertisements that represent men in a similar way, but they are from a later generation that Berger. That gap definitely contributes to how the image is viewed.

2.)

            We can apply the spectator/subject ideas to our interactions with texts in a way that opens up the text for interpretation. Mainly we can now look into a text as a subject and identify with the text personally. In a fiction we can enter a relationship with the main character that puts us in their shoes, or at least we can identify with that character.

3.)

            When looking at modern images of women the positioning of the woman is an important factor on how the image is viewed. If she faces us and is showing a lot of skin she can come off as an object. If she seems to be doing something unimportant to us as spectators it gives her her own personality and we can assume that she isn’t involved with us.

4.)

            I believe that humor defines a person very well. If someone makes a crude joke you can assume that they have a side to them that is crude, and so on. I think that humor is an opening up of kinds for people and their original jokes and what they find funny can define a person quite well.

Meta Moment

            I think reading an article concerned with nudes, nakedness, spectator, viewer, art, and advertisement all relate to concepts in writing and reading, and therefore audience and authorship. This article shows that you can look at readings and see the internal workings of the readings themselves; the thoughts that the author had when writing. This also means that as a writer one can look at their own work from a spectators point of view and see what other people are interpreting and how other people see the author.