Ways Of Seeing by John Berger

Today I got out 'ways of seeing' dvd from the uni library to get knowledge on the impact of Photography and to also look out the view of everyones appreciation of Art from the past.

This documentary gave me an insight on how paintings changed the world and then turned into photography. I learnt that the tradition of European painting was born in 1400 and died in 1900. It also makes us see paintings as nobody saw them before. But why do we?

If discovered why this is so, we shall also discover something about ourselves and the situation in which we are living. I learnt that the process of seeing paintings or anything else is less spontaneous and natural than we tend to believe.

*All large part of seeing depends upon habit and convention of perspective which is unique to European Art and perspective centres everything on the eye of the beholder!

For example; like a beam from a light house - only instead of light travelling outward, appearance has travelled in, and the tradition of art called those appearances REALITY.

What Berger has stated is that perspective is the thing which makes the eye the centre of the world, however the human eye can only be at one place at a time. - It takes its visible world with it as it walks

-With the invention of the camera everything changed, as we could see things that were not really there in front of us. And this made appearances travel across the world!

Dzega Vertof - (Russian film director) - The man with the moving camera 1928

Vertof wrote;

*I'm the eye, a mechanical eye 

I the machine show your world the only way I can see it

I free myself from today and forever from human immobility

I'm in constant movement, I approach and pull away from objects

I creep under them, I rung alongside a moving horses mouth. I fall under eyes with the falling rising body's

This is I the machine, mouvering in the kayo tic movements 

recording one movement after another, most complex combinations free from the boundaries of time and space. I co-ordinate only and all points of the universe wherever I want them to be

My way leads to a fresh perception of the world

Thus I explain, in a new way the world unknown to you

^^ A powerful statement which does make you think about how the camera actually does allow you to photograph the world unknown to yourself and others. So, the invention of the camera has changed not only what we see, but HOW we see it. - which is very important.