Ways of Seeing

1. Seeing, Images, and Mystification

• Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
• It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know if never settled.
• We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.
• Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen. The eye of the other combines with our own eye to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world.
• In the sense in which we use the word in this book, all images are man-made.
• An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced. It is an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance and preserved - for a few moments or a few centuries. Every image embodies a way of seeing.
• Every drawing or painting that used perspective proposed to the spectator that he was the unique centre of the world. The camera - and more particularly the move camera - demonstrated that there was no centre.

3. Women, Objects, Nakedness, and Nudity

• A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.
• And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.
• She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated. as herself by another.
• One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male. the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
• To be naked is to be oneself.
• To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to becomes a nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.
• To be naked is to be without disguise.
• To be on display is to have the surface of one's own skin, the hairs of one's own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
• In lived sexual experience nakedness is a process rather than a state. If one moment of that process is isolated, its image will seem banal and it banality, instead of serving as a bridge between two intense imaginative states, will be chilling.

5. Oil Painting (1500-1900) - Images as Possession

• It is usually said that the oil painting in its frame is like an imaginary window open on to the world. This is roughly the tradition's own image of itself.
• If one studies the culture of the European oil painting as a whole, and if one leaves aside its own claims for itself, its model is not so much a framed window open on to the world as a safe let into the wall, a safe in which the visible has been deposited.

7. Publicity (1900-Present) - Images as Aspiration

• In the cities in which we live, all of us see hundreds of publicity images everyday of our lives. No other kind of image confronts us so frequently.
• In no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of images, such a density of visual messages.
• One may remember or forget these messages but briefly one takes them in, and for a moment they stimulate the imagination by way of either memory or expectation. The publicity image belongs to the moment.
• We accept the total system of publicity images as we accept an element of climate.
• Glamour - The state of being envied. And publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour.
• Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of others. Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour.
• The absent, unfocused look of so many glamour images. The look out over the looks of envy which sustain them.
• The publicity image steals the consumers love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
• Does the language of publicity have anything in common with that of oil painting which, until the invention of the camera, dominated the European way of seeing during four centuries?
• Publicity relies to a very large extent on the language of oil painting. It speaks in the same voice about the same things.
• Publicity is the culture of the consumer society. It propagates through images that society's belief in itself.
• Oil painting, before it was anything else, was a celebration of private property. As an art-form it derived from the principle that you are what you have.
• It is a mistake to think of publicity supplanting the visual art of post-Ranaissance Europe; it is the last moribund form of that art.
• Publicity is, in essence, nostalgic. It has to sell the past to the future. It cannot itself supply the standards of its own claims. And so all its references to quality are bound to be retrospective and traditional. It would lack both confidence and credibility if it used a strictly contemporary language.
• Colour photography is to the spectator-buyer what oil paint was to the spectator-owner.
• The oil painting showed hat its owner was already enjoying among his possessions and his way of life. It consolidated his own sense of his own value. It enhanced his view of himself as he already was. It began with facts, the facts of his life; The paintings embellished the interior in which he actually lived.
• The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life. Not with the way of life of society, but with his own within it. It suggests that if he buys what it is offering, his life will become better. It offers him an improved alternative to what he is.
• The oil painting was addressed to those who made money out of the market. Publicity is addressed to those who constitute the market, to the spectator-buyer who is also the consumer-producer from whom profits are made twice over - as worker and then as buyer. The only places relatively free of publicity are the quarters of the very rich; their money is theirs to keep.
• All publicity works upon anxiety. The sum of everything is money, to get money is to overcome anxiety.
• Alternatively the anxiety on which publicity plays is the fear that having nothing you will be nothing.
• Publicity principally addressed to the working class tends to promise a personal transformation through the function of the particular product it is selling (Cinderella); middle-class publicity promises a transformation of relationships through a general atmosphere created by an ensemble of products (The Enchanted Palace).
• Publicity remains credible because its truthfulness is judged, not be the real fulfillment of its promises, but by the relevance of its fantasies to those of the spectator-buyer. Its essential application is not to reality but to daydreams.
• Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. The industrial society which has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating such an emotion. The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and wha the would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy hich entails, amonst other things, the overthrow of capaiblism; or else he lives, continually subject ot an envy which, compounded with his sense of powerlessness, dissolves into recurrent daydreams.
• It is this which makes it possible to understand why publicity remains credible; The gap between what publicity actually offers and the future it promises, corresponds with the gap between what the spectator-buyer feels himself to be and what he would like to be. The two gaps become one; and instead of the single gap being bridged by action or lived experience, it is filled with glamorous daydreams.
• The interminable present of meaningless working hours is "balanced" by a dreamt future in which imaginary activity replaces the passivity of the moment. In his or her daydreams the passive worker becomes the active consumer. The working self envies the consuming self.
• Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society. And it also masks what is happening in the rest of the world.
• Publicity, situated in a future continually deferred, excludes the present and so eliminates all becoming, all development. Experience is impossible within it. All that happens, happens outside it.
• The fact that publicity is eventless would be immediately obvious if it did not use a language which makes of tangibility an event in itself. Everything publicity shows is there awaiting acquisition. The act of acquiring has taken the place of all other actions, the sense of having has obliterated all other senses.
• Publicity recognizes nothing except the power to acquire. All other human faculties or needs are made subsidiary to this power. All hopes are gathered together, made homogeneous, simplified, so that they become the intense yet vague, magical yet repeatable promise offered in every purchase. No other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the culture of capaitalism.
• Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream.
• Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.