Thursday, October 3, 2013

Looking at Ways of Seeing

After watching the first episode of the Ways of Seeing series by John Berger, these are my thoughts.

The most important topic in the video to me was the idea of the camera diminishing the worth of original paintings. Berger spoke of this frequently through the program. He spoke about how the invention of the camera re-invented the paintings in a way because they could be reproduced and viewed all over the world. Later on in the program, Berger said that these reproductions distorted the meanings of the paintings, and even destroyed those meanings.

"The camera, by making the work of art transmittable, has multiplied its possible meanings and destroyed its unique original meaning." -John Berger, Ways of Seeing

This in a way shows how peoples ideology shapes how they view things like images. As another example of this, Berger showed a picture of a painting to some young children and each of them came to a different understanding of what the image meant. Their own experiences shaped how they saw the painting.

As for what I find the most interesting from the video as well as the Media Studies course so far, it would be the idea that each person can view and interpret the same thing differently. It's a concept that I am still wrapping my mind around and I think it's very interesting.

No comments:

Post a Comment