Selected Quotations from Thomas Berger's "The Art of Seeing"
Seeing comes before words.
What we know affects what we see.
We only see what we notice. It is an act of choice.
We never look at just one thing,
but at a relationship between things and ourselves.
All images are man made.
An image is a piece of sight that has been detached from space/time.
Every image embodies a “way” of seeing something. And our “seeing” depends on our way of looking.
Images represent something “absent.”
When we see a landscape we situate ourselves in it.
Compositional unity of an image contributes to its power.
Perspective makes the single eye (the God-eye) the center of the visible world
(but a god who could only be in one place at one time.
The camera showed that the notion of time passing was inseparable from the experience of the visual (except in paintings).
What you saw depended upon where you were when.
What you saw was relative to your position in time and space.
It was no longer possible to imagine everything converging to the human eye as the vanishing point of infinity.
The camera—and more particularly the movie camera—demonstrated that there was no center.
The invention of the camera changed the way people saw.
The visible came to mean something different to them.
This was immediately reflected in painting.
The invention of the camera also changed the way people saw painting.
The uniqueness of every painting was once part of the uniqueness of the place where it resided.
When the camera reproduces an image it destroys the uniqueness of its image.
As a result its meaning changes, multiplies and fragments into many meanings.
A televised image enters the atmosphere of the viewer’s home, his memories, his furniture, wallpaper, etc.
The televised and reproduce image lends its meaning to their meaning.
The meaning of the original no longer lies in what it uniquely says but in what it uniquely is.
It is defined as an object whose value depends upon its rarity (take the Mona Lisa reproduced and mass marketed on post cards, posters, bags and tee shirts).
A woman’s presence in an image is always different than a man’s.
Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
Kenneth Clark in his book on The Nude maintains that to be naked is to be without clothes, whereas the nude is a form of art.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
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