To emphasise the notion of close collaboration, Berger insisted that royalties of the first printing be split equally five ways.īe the first to know. According to Hollis, their roles were vaguely defined and left plenty of room to manoeuvre. This simple but powerful exercise illustrates Berger’s point of the impact words can have on an image.īerger teamed up with four other partners, Sven Bloomberg (collage artist), Michael Dibb (BBC producer), Richard Hollis (graphic designer) and Chris Fox (‘critical’ friend), who are given equal credit in the book. When the reader does so, he finds the same picture at the top of next page, accompanied by a handwritten note that reads: ‘This is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself’.
Subsequent text tells us to ‘Look at it for a moment. The text above confirms our assumption that it is ‘a landscape of a cornfield with birds flying out of it’. The authors place an uncredited black-and-white reproduction of a recognisable Van Gogh at the bottom of one page. In the book, the simple act of turning a page serves much the same purpose in comparing two views of a Van Gogh painting with different annotations.
On the TV screen, Berger uses silence as an active agent of change in how we see things. In expanding WoS and elaborating it to fit a book format, Berger’s team successfully makes use of the limitations and conventions of print publishing. The adaptation of WoS from TV to a book format is unusual in that it maintains the extraordinary clarity of his points even ‘in translation’. It has already been frequently noted that the process of adapting a work to a different medium doesn’t often succeed in taking the parameters of the new medium fully into account, flattening the carefully composed points into a mere ‘story’ deprived of the subtle context that originally surrounded them. I hope you will consider what I arranged, but be sceptical of it.’
you receive images and meanings which are arranged. Meanwhile, with this programme, as with all programmes. For that to become possible in the modern media of communication, access to television must be extended beyond these present narrow limits. The images may be like words, but there is no dialogue yet.
The first part of the series starts with Berger cutting up Botticelli’s painting Venus and Mars, and ends with Berger speaking straight into the camera, warning: ‘But remember that I am controlling and using for my own purposes the means of reproductions needed for these programmes. He is a charismatic speaker who talks directly to his audience, patiently explaining his ideas, mercilessly demolishing the bourgeois idea of art. In the series, Berger, long-haired, his shirt open at the neck, set against a blue background void of books and other symbols of knowledge, acts as the author, presenter and iconoclast. Ways of Seeing was first broadcast by BBC in 1972, as a four-part TV series. He diverges from Benjamin significantly, however, in that while Work of Art is written in a style which at times is rather convoluted and inaccessible for those not initiated into the mysteries of art criticism and philosophy, the language of Ways of Seeing is conversational and easy to read. Like Benjamin, Berger raises questions about hidden ideologies in visual images and explores the idea of art as commodity. Berger builds some of his arguments on Walter Benjamin’s seminal book The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.