Reddit reviews Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series (Penguin Books for Art)
We found 11 Reddit comments about Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series (Penguin Books for Art). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Penguin Books
A little art appresciation? "Ways of Seeing" by John Berger. 20th Century art music: "The Rest is Noise" by Alex Ross.
Since you don't say whether you want to learn how to operate a camera or the field of photography in general and what interests you in photography in particular this is quite a stab in the dark but here are a few suggestions of books I keep coming back to or hold important.
This assumes that you have a basic understanding on how to operate a camera. If you don't, read your camera manual or something like Adam's The Camera and .
Technical advice
Theory/Motivational advice
Ways of Seeing
https://www.amazon.com/Ways-Seeing-Based-Television-Penguin/dp/0140135154
It was based on a TV series from BBC
Seconded, with the addition of John Berger - Ways of Seeing
The BBC show 'Ways of Seeing' which the book is based on is available streaming on Netflix and is worth the watch in my opinion.
Both standard texts, but quite academic. Not exactly books for the flickr crowd.
I encountered it in Ways of Seeing, but I don't think they originated it.
John Berger's Ways of Seeing (absolutely brilliant)
Ron Carlson Writes a Story
Critical Theory Today
Wilhelm Reich-The Mass Psychology of Fascism
Amy Bloom-Normal
Tom Stoppard-Arcadia
Sara Marcus-Girls to the Front
If you liked this, you might like Ways Of Seeing by Berger, a classic art criticism text:
http://www.amazon.com/Ways-Seeing-Based-Television-Series/dp/0140135154/
Pretty eye opening to people like me who had never been exposed to the thought processes that go into making art and the formation of different movements in art.
Ways of Seeing is so, so good. There's a book, too - well worth it.
A bit dated, but a pretty famous documentary series by John Berger called Ways of Seeing has an episode on the painted tradition of the female nude. It's also a book if you're interested. It's also a book if that floats your boat.
Heidegger's pretty abstract, but he pushes against the subject/object dichotomy in art in his The Origin of the Work of Art. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex discusses women as Other at length, and she was pretty heavily influenced by Heidegger, so those might be worth looking into.
(Sorry to be slow to respond; I just got back from work.)
Thanks for your long, thoughtful comment.
My critique of the painting grows out of the long history of paintings like this and how they were used. There's a ton of writing on paintings like this -- just as there were a TON of paintings like this -- which were hung in men's bedrooms/private spaces. Such paintings might now seem pretty tame but at the time they were not. According to art historians, they were painted precisely to help with male desire. (See, for example, T. J. Clark's The Painting of Modern Life, about painting in Paris in the 19th century; the book shows page after page of paintings just like the The Massage and discusses their "uses." Another commenter here mentioned John Berger's Ways of Seeing (book or video. Or watch Hannah Gadsby's amazing Nanette on Netflix.)
But even through they seem pretty tame now, such paintings still feed attitudes about women. And the attitude toward women this painting presents is all in-line (for me) with what we are seeing now in the Kavanaugh hearings, for example: The attitude toward women of this painting, like the apparent attitude of Kavanaugh and the other "Renate Alumni" guys, is that women exist for men. Women are supposed to be passive objects for male desire.
Compare this painting to Manet's Olympia, for example, which also shows a white woman and a subservient black woman. The white woman looks directly at viewers, meeting their eyes, making it hard to think of her as just an object to look at; in the painting we discuss here, by Debat-Ponsan, the white woman's face isn't even shown. Both paintings put women of color in secondary, passive positions.
One painting alone is not going to teach men to believe that women are passive objects. But it is precisely because there are THOUSANDS of paintings like this, shown over and over and in different places, that they can teach attitudes I think we don't want to have toward each other.
So I clearly disagree with you that this painting and the current male-dominated-political drama have nothing to do with each other. This painting, as part of a long tradition of representations of women in art and film, has a large part to play in how men learn to think women are their playthings.