Every Picture Is Worth 1000 Words

Unit : Cultural Identities in Texts 212 - Implications of Modernity
Reading Notes for Week 4 (250 word limit)

This article argues that oil paintings are a visual text that can be used to demonstrate ways of seeing that were present in the modern era. Oil paintings, more than other forms of art, portrayed these ways of seeing because its techniques made for far more realistic paintings - could more accurately show “life as it truly was.”

Berger demonstrates how capitalist obsessions were ingrained into the oil painting and thus into our way of seeing the world. He uses The Ambassadors as an example of how wealth was portrayed in oil paintings. This did not only have to be monetary wealth, as the use of the lute and up-to-date maps show. Knowledge is power.

In general, only those things that could be owned and that implied ownership were included in paintings. Thus, landscapes were not generally painted as they were without the boundaries of ownership. The exception is in the portrayal of people with the land they owned.

Paintings also constructed certain narratives about the people that they portrayed. For instance, oil paintings' ability to show skin tones made images of women more “realistic.” The woman then becomes the sexual object of the (mostly male) gaze. This would then make the purity of some painted women questionable, simply through their sexual portrayal through painting.

Constructions of social class can be found in images of the poor, who were shown to have their hopes pinned on the upper classes, which the same upper classes would have endorsed - as it is most likely that they themselves commissioned the paintings.

Reading
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. British Broadcasting Corporation & Penguin Books. Norwich, 1979. 83-113