Ways of Seeing was published by Penguin Books in 1972, based on the four-part BBC television series of the same name. It is one of the most influential books about visual culture ever written — a short, polemical, beautifully designed work that changed how millions of people think about images and their relationship to power.
Berger’s central argument, drawn partly from Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” is that mechanical reproduction fundamentally changed our relationship to all images. Before the camera, every painting existed in one place, and seeing it required a journey. Reproduction made images portable, but it also stripped them of their original context — their relationship to the building they were painted for, the patron who commissioned them, the specific set of eyes they addressed. What fills this absence of context is mystification: the language of art appreciation, which obscures the material and social conditions of painting’s production behind talk of genius, beauty, and transcendence.
The book’s seven essays (three are entirely visual — composed of images without text) cover the nude in European oil painting (arguing that the convention of the female nude is addressed to a male viewer and positions women as objects of display), the relationship between oil painting and property (arguing that oil painting’s development coincides with and serves the interests of a new propertied class), and the continuity between oil painting traditions and modern advertising.
Collecting Ways of Seeing
First edition (Penguin Books, London, 1972): Trade paperback original.
Market values:
- First Penguin paperback (1972): $30–$80
- Signed copies: $100–$300
- Later printings: $5–$15