"Ways of Seeing" - John Berger

The text you are reading right now will give you all the information you need. What if this statement could be placed into an image? All the information that you ever needed to know about the Civil War, or the Apollo 13 disaster, or how the interior of a heart looked was all present in a single painting. How we communicate or interpret information is a powerful tool. Visual communication has always been an important source of understanding and reasoning for humans. One image could lead to a memory or to a story we had previously heard. The important elements of visual media are how and who presents it; therefore, these key factors alter how we comprehend any information given to us.

In John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing,” he states that the “silence and stillness” of paintings, sketches, and other stationary art are what make them striking. All the information that you would ever need sits perfectly still in front of you. You are the one who guides the eye and has the choice of seeing this piece of information, or, simply to walk away from it in entirety. However, these paintings, we must remember, are still man-made. The eye is still guided through the painting by means of composition.

Similarly, in film, the director guides us through a scene to the focal point of the story. The main difference between this moving media and a stationary painting is that information is given to us “unfolds in time,” Berger explains. This again relates back to the idea that in man-made information the artist has true “authority” over the work. However, the information that is given over time in a piece of film also differs from stationary art by giving only highlights of information.

If we look at a painting of a crowd from a standing still position, we will notice the crowd as a whole and our eye can move freely throughout the piece. If we instead took this painting and let the camera take over where our eye would go, we would find this painting to have a very different meaning. Zooming inwards, we would find, for example, highlighted by directional lighting, Jesus carrying a cross. Or, if we panned up to the back of the painting, a beautiful landscape with trees, hills, and calm skies. Each detail of the painting could be separated into a story and focal point of its own.

Now that you can see that visual communication is a powerful tool, learn to recognize how you have been guided to see the big picture or the details.