WAYS OF SEEING. J BERGER.

Our reading this week was a chapter taken from John Berger's text 'Ways of Seeing'.  Well...I say 'reading' even though the whole chapter is based solely on images so we didn't have to take in any physical text at all.
We were given a number of questions answer, showing what understood from his work.. I found this quite a challenging.
I feel that the author chose to compose this particular section using only photographs because each image has the power to convey a huge amount of meaning by itself, even without text.  It forces the viewer to think deeper about the subject itself and you have to construct your own ideas in order to understand and create a significant meaning out of it.
I found this task very hard to complete as I prefer to see additional information along with the images I am looking at.
But after our group discussions in the studio I had a better understanding about the work and what I think Berger was trying to present to the audience.

First page scanned from chapter - body and surrealism. 

• All of the work is about the body in context as well as covering issues to do with fantasy, surrealism and dreams.  There is also a lot of high-class and wealthy depictions of people throughout.

Displaying the female working class. 

The wealthy with their animals. 

• Our reading of these original images can change over time as the idea of beauty has changed, in some of the illustrations on the page the women depicted were quite large in size whereas now that isn't often seen.  The majority of the models these days are tall with very slim figures. 

Last page I scanned showing how female
 models were depicted at this time

.WHAT I LEARNT FROM THIS TEXT.
Text can alter how you read a photograph dramatically, either through giving you specific information about how the actual work was made? Even doing to the finer details about where, when or how it was taken?
The direction through text can also change in power, sometimes the views can be quite subtle which still allow the audience to make personal meaning, whereas in other situations the author tries to persuade us in a much more forceful way.
Words also have the power to influence what we understand and how we then react to a creation, people can manipulate your own opinion on something by how they choose to present it to you.. without words this is a lot harder to do as it is left down to you in order to generate an understanding.