'Seeing' in the New Year?

Extracts from:

John Berger's Ways of Seeing 

(Penguin: London, 1972) - 37 years ago!

"Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak."

"But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight..."

"The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe..."

"We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice..."

"We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves..."

"An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced. It is an appearance, or set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance and preserved..."

"The visual arts have always existed within a certain preserve; originally this preserve was magical or sacred. But it was also physical: it was the place, the cave, the building, in which, or for which, the work was made. The experience of art, which at first was the experience of ritual, was set apart from the rest of life - precisely in order to be able to exercise power over it...."

"For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. They surround us in the same way as a language surrounds us. They have entered the mainstream of life over which they no longer, in themselves, have power..."

"The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language for what purpose..."

"A people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or class than one that has been able to situate itself in history..."

"Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable."