Chapter 1 of Ways of Seeing by John Berger

Seeing precedes words: vision establishes how people locate themselves in the world and is shaped by knowledge, belief and choice. Images are human constructions that detach appearances from their original time and place, and every picture - even a casual photograph - embodies the maker’s way of seeing because someone selected that view from many possibilities. Over centuries images came to record not only what things looked like but how they were seen by others and by the artist, making visual work a particularly direct testimony about past societies. Yet the act of looking at art is mediated by learned assumptions about beauty, truth, genius, civilization, form, status and taste; these inherited frameworks can misread or obscure historical meaning rather than clarify it.

Those conventions serve social purposes: mystifying the past can protect elite interests by inventing a retrospective history that justifies existing power. A concrete example is the late group portraits by Frans Hals. Formalist criticism celebrates their compositional unity and painterly bravura while treating emotion as aesthetic effect; such readings neutralize the paintings’ social tension. Rather than accept art-historical assertions that such paintings merely “seduce” viewers into knowing sitters’ personalities, a grounded view insists on the reciprocal gaze and the social drama - Hals an impoverished painter portraying wealthy governors - that the images themselves reveal.