Book Report (Fashion Only Forum 1/12/00)

I read another book. This always happens to me when I read too much - I start thinking again, and that means I get all confused.

The little book is Ways of Seeing by John Berger, and it is based on a BBC series about Western art. Little books appeal to me because they're cheap, and I'm pretty sure I can finish them, even if they're bad.

This book didn't start bad. It did make me think some, especially Chapter 3 (untitled) on the portrayal of women in Western art, specifically in oil paintings. In discussions of paintings in other chapters, a point had been made that paintings were often used to show either what you had, or could have. The term "objets d' art," for example, once described the stuff that was the subject of paintings, but has now come to mean objects that are considered art in themselves. Paintings showed affluence, or control over stuff - mostly really expensive stuff.

As an aside, this attitude wasn't considered prevalent in non-Western art. The West owes it's success to capitalism, greed and a healthy dose of aggression - all good things in the survival of a culture, despite the fact that all those things are PC-wise "bad."

Back to the thread of the topic, though. Berger shows many examples of paintings as substitutes for the real thing, including paintings of other paintings, indicating the owner somehow possessed all the paintings in the painting by some form of remote control or voodoo. Also paintings of fine horses or other livestock, sometimes owned by the paintings' owners, sometimes not.

By now you're probably figuring out where this is going. Back to women. Women have always been the number one, first and foremost, subject of art in the West. Berger indicates that through the paintings (and by extension sculptures and perhaps photographs) the women are symbolically objets d' art, somehow owned by the owner of the art. Specifically, he points out that the men (always men) that were affluent enough to commission or buy the paintings were older, and were declaring through the art that they somehow had control over the women in the paintings, or could have that control.

This got me thinking about all of us middle-aged photographers out here on the web, and whether that same hypothesized claim of ownership of women would apply to our work.

It was about this time that I decided Berger was wrong. Wrong about the symbolic ownership and objectification of women, and wrong about his hypothesis that paintings "of" stuff were somehow the same "as" stuff. A photograph of a woman is only mistaken for a woman by a very feeble mind. And a photograph of a car cannot be driven, nor does it give the status of the owner of the car to the owner of the picture (though I knew folks with Mercedes keyrings that I thought were pretty cool until I saw their Chevettes, etc.)

At this point, most of what Berger said was starting to disintegrate, and even the chapter on "Publicity" which dealt directly with photography was losing it's veracity as a serious indicator of Western greed and consumerism.

So, all in all, I spent $12.95 for a book the only use of which was to make me think more than I would have if I'd watched "The Simpsons." But it's not staying on my shelf as any kind of a reference. It might actually get someone all a-twitter about objectification, and ownership of women and other crap like that, so it's getting shredded.

I don't recommend the book Ways of Seeing by John Berger.

-Don