Response to John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" Episode One

In John Berger’s first episode of, “Ways of Seeing,” from 1972, he discusses how the process of viewing and learning about art has changed as the ability for artworks to be reproduced has become easier.

Berger uses the Goya painting, “The Third of May 1808,” of the men and the firing squad to illustrate how the meaning of a work can be changed given the context in which it was viewed. This stood out to me the most in the video. I have been fortunate enough to see the painting in person twice, at the Prado in Madrid. Each time I saw it, though in person, was in a different context. The first time I saw it, I did not know who Goya was, or why the painting mattered. I simply looked at it in the room with the other Goyas as we passed through, and then moved on to the Rembrants, trying to keep up with my mother’s hurried pace. The Goya had zero impact on me that time, as I was simply trying to keep an eye on my mother so that I did not get lost. The second time I saw the painting was with my study abroad group. We were allotted a couple of hours to spend in the museum as we wished. I had heard the name “Goya” multiple times during my time studying there, and had seen a photograph of the painting in my textbook a few days prior to our trip to the Prado. This time I had set out time to goo and see this painting. It was big, and made me scared for the man in it. I felt free to stare at it close to the canvas and from the other end of the room. That moment that was captured in the painting was not the one that I had seen in the textbook, nor the one that I gave a hurried glance to when I saw it in person before. I actually got to see it and take it in the way it was meant to be viewed. In Berger’s video, I recognized the painting, but after watching the video of the girls dancing before it, I did not really care. I was waiting for Berger to continue talking; my brain was going the pace of the song the dancers were singing instead of the slow, reflective one that it was in the museum the second time. It completely changed again when he changed the video to a slower, darker one. It made a tiny bit more sense this time, but I am honestly not sure if the two things are related at all. Also, the frame of the camera only captured the face of the main figure in the Goya, and neglected the rest of the scene, which further took away from viewing the painting on its own, even via a secondary means like a video.

These different contexts in which I have viewed the work, have, as Berger asserted in his video, altered the viewing experience, and subsequent meanings gathered from the work as a whole. The experiences of the viewer, the environment or media in which the work is viewed, and how and where the work is displayed, all impact the meaning that the viewer can gather from the work.