“It’s Fucking Obvious!”

Abstract

Here’s a question: are the visual essays that make up almost half of Ways of Seeing important to Ways of Seeing? Fifty years ago, as the book was being made, only one person seemed to think so: Sven Blomberg, the ‘tall Swede’ brought in by John Berger as an ‘outside eye’ on the process.¹ An artist himself, Blomberg was the only one of the five people whom Berger credited with turning Ways of Seeing into a book who had neither worked on the television series nor had any experience in making books. Let’s tally the others. Mike Dibb had been the series producer and director, Chris Fox its script consultant. Richard Hollis, responsible for the book’s design (later made ‘horrible’, in Hollis’s own words, by its inclusion and redesign for the Penguin On Design series),² had recently worked with Berger on his novel G, and was recognised as one of the most daring graphic designers of his generation. And then there was Berger: writer and presenter of the television series and the one whose name was on the cover. As for Blomberg … Well, he certainly was close to Berger. Talking to Juliette Kristensen for an anniversary issue of the Journal of Visual Design dedicated to Ways of Seeing, Dibb described Blomberg as ‘a close friend of John’s, an impoverished artist whom John wanted to help and thought would add something fresh to the book’. Hollis recalled: ‘He was rather a confusion because he made these montages of various things. I remember Mike saying to him “Sven, I don’t quite understand what it is that this is trying to say.” And Sven just said, “It’s fucking obvious!” And then went and stood on the balcony.’³

The montages were to become the book’s ‘purely pictorial essays’ – or as Dibb put it: ‘little visual essays that meant more, I think, to [Blomberg] than to everybody else’.⁴ Later, Hollis said that Berger ‘more or less approved’ of Blomberg’s essays, which Blomberg brought in as large sheets of paper with reproductions pasted on them. Dibb and Hollis were then assigned the task of fitting them into the pages of the book, tidying them up and ‘maybe editing them’. But they always struggled to understand their relevance.⁵

The pictorial essays certainly raised questions before publication. What happened next? The book’s fame and impact, taken along with the television series, grew to a level that makes it hard to measure. In the words of Berger’s biographer Joshua Sperling, Ways of Seeing became ‘so influential as to seem now, in retrospect, almost out of date – its influence disseminated, internalized, and since moved on from by the culture’,⁶ but the pictorial essays tend to be acknowledged in passing rather than subjected to in-depth analysis in most discussions of the work. There is one possible explanation: while the pictorial essays were intended to raise ‘as many questions as the verbal essays’, they also raise many of the same questions as the verbal essays. The first pictorial essay opens with a photograph of a woman in some kind of modern workspace, seemingly oblivious to her surroundings in a vaguely Vermeer-ish way, and another of a glamorous-looking woman taken from the inside of a car, playing it cool as she is ogled by an older man standing outside the vehicle. On the next spread, soft-core pornographic images placed side by side with reproductions of paintings of naked women by Picasso, Modigliani and Gauguin, as well as a Giacometti statue, face Rembrandt’s Bathsheba. On the pages that follow: advertisements of women’s stockings and deodorant; a spread of meat and olives; a still life. More women’s stockings, a woman doing her make-up, and finally, a woman photographed from behind as she faces a wall of press photographers, printed below a reproduction of Rubens’s The Judgement of Paris.

But even if the pictorial essays to a large extent serve as visualisations of points made in the verbal essays (the second and third pictorial essays can be viewed as riffs on the theme of oil-painting as a vehicle for showing off property), they are also a source of a not-so-subtle dissonance within the work. As the preface explains, ‘Sometimes in the pictorial essays no information at all is given about the images reproduced because it seemed to us that such information might distract from the points being made.’⁸ The reader is also assured that the ideas driving the book have not only shaped what is being said but also how: ‘The form of the book is as much to do with our purpose as the arguments contained within it.’⁹ The most distinguished feature of its ‘form’, however, is not the separation of words and images, as exemplified by the pictorial essays, but their fusion on the page. In designing the book, Hollis wanted to give equal weight to image and text, placing the images in the text as they were being referred to, ‘so you weren’t distracted and just read on’.¹⁰ His chief influence was Chris Marker’s book Commentaires, which has film stills set within the text. ‘As you read you knew exactly what was being talked about’, he told an interviewer in Eye in 2006. ‘It was a substitute for description: instead of talking about something, you show the objective visual evidence. That’s how I wanted to do Ways of Seeing, rather than have images by the side or text followed by a page of images.’¹¹

Ways of Seeing is explicitly offered as a book about words and images and the way they can be made to interact; a book that grew out of a television series, where words and images could be made to appear simultaneously on the screen in a real-time collage, an opportunity Berger and his collaborators seized with both hands. It is also a book that continued Berger’s effort – initiated by A Fortunate Man in 1967 and culminating to a large degree with A Seventh Man in 1975 – of dissolving the binary of the verbal vs. the visual and making text and image work together on the page, telling whatever needs to be told. Why, then, were words effectively banned from interaction with images in large parts of the book, with John Berger’s approval?

It might have come down to keeping Sven Blomberg happy. Yet the idea that words can ‘disrupt’, or even corrupt, our appreciation of images, isn’t confined to the book’s pictorial essays. Ways of Seeing is a book which testifies to the close relationship between words and images, but it’s also a cautionary tale about how the former can interfere with our understanding of the latter. In a famous passage from the book’s opening essay, a Van Gogh painting is reproduced underneath the words ‘This is a landscape of a cornfield with birds flying out of it. Look at it for a moment. Then turn the page.’ On the following page, the same painting is shown above the following text: ‘This is the last painting Van Gogh painted before he killed himself.’ Berger muses:

Something of the same can be said about the separation of image and text in Ways of Seeing: However much the three wordless essays are presented as being freed from the word, the feeling lingers that what the authors in fact did was to try – and fail – to protect them from it.

Are the pictorial essays not important then? In his conversation with Juliette Kristensen, Mike Dibb said he thought that Blomberg’s collages do ‘in a funny way help the book. They’re informal. They provide a sort of visual space and a kind of visual library.’¹⁵ The informality of Ways of Seeing – its distinctive approachableness – is by no means its least important quality, and the pictorial essays serve to signal that Ways of Seeing is different from the stuffy, mystifying art books it was setting itself up against. In 1972, the format of the visual essay was unusual, and, in books as popular as Ways of Seeing was to become, practically unheard of.¹⁶

There were precedents for this methodology, the closest perhaps being German art historian Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. This work, started in 1927 but left unfinished when Warburg died in 1929, consisted of sixty-three wooden panels on which Warburg pinned close to 1,000 pictures culled from various sources: books, magazines, newspapers, advertisements. The pictures were arranged according to different themes, including ‘Vehicles of Tradition’, ‘From the Muses to Manet’ and ‘The classical tradition today’. The overarching goal was to trace recurring visual themes and patterns, from antiquity to the Renaissance and all the way up to contemporary culture.¹⁷ There were no captions, and only a few texts – Warburg believed the images, when juxtaposed and then placed in sequence, could foster ‘immediate, synoptic insights’.¹⁸ (He wanted it, one might say, to be f—ing obvious.) As Mark Fincher notes, neither Berger nor his collaborator was likely to be aware of Warburg’s Bilderatlas – Warburg’s work being, in the early 1970s, too obscure.¹⁹ Still, art historian Griselda Pollock has been among those making the link between Ways of Seeing and Warburg, via Walter Benjamin’s debts to the Bilderatlas and its use of the ‘still novel resources of the photomechanical reproduction as images of hitherto fixed art objects’.²⁰ Pollock names the pictorial essays as the inspiration for her own use of the format in Vision and Difference, her 2003 analysis of the sexual politics of modernist art. Others have argued for their pedagogical value, as models for the teaching of a cultural analysis less indebted to the verbal and more open to visually based knowledge.²¹

Fifty years after they were first made, the pictorial essays of Ways of Seeing still serve as testaments to the collaborative process out of which the book grew, with each collaborator leaving his mark – one way or the other. A more thorough analysis of their meaning beyond the scope of the arguments of Ways of Seeing might still be relevant. But their most interesting feature might be precisely their contradictory relationship with the project as a whole. In that sense, they are obviously important.