MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Ways of Seeing is a four-part television series written by British art critic John Berger. After being broadcast in 1972, the series became a book of the same name. The television serie was intended as a response to Civilisation, a documentary series that represents a traditional vision of the Western artistic and cultural canon. In Ways of Seeing, Berger argues that our perception is always influenced by assumptions about beauty, truth, civilisation, shape, taste, class and gender. What we see has to do with knowledge, belief and the relationship between ourselves and our environment, elements that are constantly changing. For him, looking at an image objectively seems impossible, because we always try to read the image's language.