Cultural Memory and Photographs · Topic 5 — John Berger, Essays 1 & 3
Berger opens with a foundational claim: "Seeing comes before words." The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But this is not merely a developmental observation — it is philosophical. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. We see the sun set each evening; we know the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge never quite fits the sight.
An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced — detached from the place and time in which it first appeared and preserved. Every image embodies a way of seeing, even a photograph.
Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something absent. Gradually it became evident an image could outlast what it represented — and thus showed how something had once looked.
The invention of the camera fundamentally changed how humans see — and how they see paintings made long before the camera existed. Before photography, perspective organized the visual field so that every drawing or painting proposed to the spectator that he was the unique centre of the world. The camera destroyed this fiction.
This shattered the convention of perspective and immediately affected painting: the Impressionists made the visible fugitive; the Cubists showed the totality of possible views rather than the single fixed viewpoint.
When a camera reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image. As a result its meaning changes — or more exactly, it multiplies and fragments into many meanings. The painting now travels to the spectator rather than the spectator to the painting.
The original work's meaning lay in what it uniquely said — in its image and its specific presence in a specific place, often as part of a building's life.
Now its uniqueness lies in being the original of a reproduction. Its first meaning is no longer what it shows — but what it is: a relic. Its value is defined by rarity and market price.
Berger argues that the cult of the original work has become "bogus religiosity" — works of art are discussed as holy relics, their value affirmed by market price yet dressed in spiritual language. This mystification serves a social function: it excludes the majority and preserves art as the property of a privileged class.
Berger references Walter Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) as the intellectual foundation for these ideas. What reproduction destroys is the "aura" — the unique presence of the original in time and space. What it creates is a new democratic potential: images can now reach everyone, be used by anyone.
When an image is presented as a work of art, viewers bring a series of learnt assumptions: Beauty, Truth, Genius, Civilization, Form, Status, Taste. These assumptions mystify rather than clarify — they make art unnecessarily remote and deprive people of a history that belongs to them.
The term "oil painting" refers to more than a technique — it defines an art form with its own way of seeing, dominant from roughly 1500 to 1900. Oil paint's defining property is its ability to render tangibility, texture, lustre, solidity. It defines the real as that which you can put your hands on.
The central argument of Essay 3: oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.
Rich Italian merchants of the Renaissance looked upon painters as agents "who allowed them to confirm their possession of all that was beautiful and desirable in the world." A collection of paintings was a microcosm — the proprietor had recreated within reach all the features of the world to which he was attached.
| Genre | What It Showed | Social Function |
|---|---|---|
| Portraits | The individual sitter's presence and wealth | Confirmed the owner's social status; face became a mask of costume |
| Still Life | Edible goods, luxury objects, merchandise | Demonstrated wealth and habitual style of living |
| Animals | Livestock with emphasized pedigree | Proof of the owner's breeding stock's value — "animals painted like pieces of furniture" |
| Buildings / Landscape | Landed property, estates | Celebrated ownership of land; Mr & Mrs Andrews as proud landowners |
| Mythological / History | Classical scenes, idealized figures | Supplied a cultural guise for the owner's own power — a garment of nobility to wear |
| "Genre" (low life) | Scenes of the poor, taverns, daily life | Proved virtue = success; reassured the bourgeoisie of their moral worth |
Berger uses this painting as a case study. The two ambassadors are surrounded by instruments of navigation (for the slave trade and ocean routes), a globe charting Magellan's voyage, books of arithmetic and a hymn book — tools of colonization: Christianity and accounting. Their gaze is aloof and wary, expecting no reciprocity. They are convinced the world exists to furnish their residence in it.
Berger distinguishes between the average work (produced more or less cynically, serving the market) and the exceptional work (where the painter struggled against the tradition's own language). The great artists — Rembrandt, Vermeer, Turner — are acclaimed as the tradition's supreme representatives, yet their work was diametrically opposed to its values.
The tradition's own image of itself is a framed window open onto the world. Berger's counter-image: "a safe let into the wall, a safe in which the visible has been deposited." The oil painting did not open a view — it enclosed and possessed a view for its owner.
Q: According to Berger (following Benjamin), how did the invention of the camera change the way we see paintings? What happens to the "uniqueness" of the original work after mechanical reproduction?
Q: Berger argues that oil painting "did to appearances what capital did to social relations." Explain this claim using at least two genres of oil painting as examples.
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