#JOHN BERGER WAYS OF SEEING CAMERA WINDOWS#

Framed oil paintings often hang in shop windows as part of their display.ДЄny work of art 'quoted' by publicity serves two purposes. вЂњPublicity images often use sculptures or paintings to lend allure or authority to their own message. One could put this another way : the publicity images steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.

You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. The happiness of being envied is glamour.Д«eing envied is a solitary form of reassurance. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness : happiness as judged from the outside by others. Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of others. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. Publicity is always about the future buyer. Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. This is why publicity can never really afford to be about the product or opportunity it is proposing to the buyer who is not yet enjoying it. The more convincingly publicity conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the more the spectator-buyer will become aware that he is hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more remote the chance of bathing in it will seem to him. But it cannot offer the real object of pleasure and there is no convincing substitute for a pleasure in that pleasure's own terms.

Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure. Clothes, food, cars, cosmetics, baths, sunshine are real things to be enjoyed in themselves. вЂњPublicity is effective precisely because it feeds upon the real.

Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision : a sight.вЂќ The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Only a man can make a good joke for its own sake. If a woman makes a good joke this is an example of how she treats the joker in herself and accordingly of how she as a joker-woman would like to be treated by others. If a man does the same, his action is only read as an expression of his anger. If a woman throws a glass on the floor, this is an example of how she treats her own emotion of anger and so of how she would wish it to be treated by others. Every one of her actions - whatever its direct purpose or motivation - is also read as an indication of how she would like to be treated. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.Д®very woman's presence regulates what is and is not 'permissible' within her presence. 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. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.вЂќ Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. 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. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.

John berger ways of seeing camera