Ways of Seeing


After watching the first episode of John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" program, I found it quite interesting to experience Berger examining the impact of photography on our appreciation of art from the past. It made me reflect and think about the impact of art now and the environment in which I most often view it.

Everything is digital now in days, personally I haven't experienced Art in a traditional museum up until last week when I went with my Messina on a trip to the BMA. I really enjoyed that experience because the only thing I was focused on was purely the art, not my dog at my feet or the the tv playing in the background as I stare at some image of an old renaissance painting. Another piece of insight I took away was that uninterrupted silence that can lead to striking stillness. I completely agree with that and found this true at my recent trip to the BMA. He also talks about perspective and how taking pieces of art and zooming in/ ignoring other details can create whole new story line, I found this extremely interesting and his examples were very effective.
I think my favorite part of the entire video is when Berger predicts Youtube in 1972 at minute 28:39. There was a lot of moments within the video that were (meta)-esk. It was very interesting due to the aspect of Meta and made the video from the 70s interesting to watch.

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