Fifty Years of Ways of Seeing
In January 1972, John Berger and Mike Dibb’s seminal television series Ways of Seeing aired on BBC Two. In contrast to other art history series of the time, it criticised traditional Western cultural aesthetics, interrogating European oil painting, advertising, photography, and the genre of the nude. It aimed to demystify art and democratise scholarly ideas for a wider audience, and to encourage us to think about the meaning of images, and the political ideologies that underpin them. Its most enduring legacy is perhaps its second episode on women and art, which drew on the existing work of feminist critics to show how, in European oil paintings and contemporary culture alike, women are rendered as objects. It also introduced the concept of the ‘male gaze’, which soon became a key theoretical term in feminist readings of contemporary culture and media. In the fifty years since its release, Ways of Seeing has continued to influence and inspire new generations of thinkers.
The BBC has marked the occasion with Viewfinders: Ways of Seeing at 50 on Radio 4, in which five writers talk about an image that is important to them, and reflect on how Ways of Seeing—both the TV series and the accompanying book—has influenced their own ways of thinking about art. The series features Geoff Dyer on a photograph by Robert Capa; Olivia Laing on Giovanni di Paolo’s painting Saint John the Baptist Returning to the Desert; Tom Overton on a self-portrait by John Berger; Sinéad Gleeson on Yellow, a performance by artist Amanda Coogan; and Melissa Chemam on Lubaina Himid’s installation Naming the Money.
In our own celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Ways of Seeing, we are releasing some unseen, behind-the-scenes footage of John Berger watching material from our 2016 film The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger in his Paris apartment, with Tilda Swinton and Colin MacCabe, in 2015. The Seasons in Quincy features extracts from Ways of Seeing.
The Seasons in Quincy is distributed in the UK by Artificial Eye, and is available to buy or rent on Curzon Home Cinema, YouTube, and Amazon Prime.