The ideas of John Berger continue to inspire and elucidate a world in which power relationships and media management seem so completely enmeshed it’s hard to comprehend any kind of journalism that isn’t warped out of all recognition. In the run up to the UK General Election on May 6th, I haven’t seem too much analysis that takes a snapshot of media activity and tries to, with the reader or viewer or listener, make critical sense of it. It’s as if everyone involved really thinks that have to cover the enormity of everything that feeds into the process. It’s like some major feat of engineering or architecture, where there must always be millions of plans, dependencies and processes as the finished product is so huge.
It’s reassuring at times like this, to stop and think about stillness amongst all this. The writing of John Berger eloquently allows us to focus back on a snapshot in time, a moment in history. This is not a paean to a definitive image, the poster campaign piece, the iconic image, or utterance. Anything taken in isolation runs the risk of becoming this. Berger suggests we take a moment to think about this…
Berger is concerned throughout ‘Ways of Seeing’ with the monetisation of art, and the way in which the oil painting celebrated a new kind of wealth, by providing 3. fairly rigid and set ways in which portraits and landscapes sanctioned the supreme buying power of money. It was a very material means of displaying your wealth; Berger uses a set of visual references to underline his point. These show wealthy aristocrats standing next to pictures, sometimes of themselves, of mastery of country estates, or highly contrived portraits of business and commercial partnerships, with other wealthy citizens.
Berger states that, ‘the visual desirability of what can be bought lies in its tangibility, in how it will reward the touch, the hand, of the owner.’
I think this is interesting and useful to hold in mind at the moment. The media is guiding us to consider politicians and their politics to see what they could do for us, our families and our economies, to protect ‘our way of life’. But so much has gone into those ways of life, and we can lose a lot and still be ‘us’ that I think we should start to think about how that 54% of young people got so disengaged and unregistered to vote as a consequence of the way media treats them. I think that much maligned subject ‘media studies’ could do with some major refreshes, and personally I would start by giving everyone in the UK a free copy of Ways of Seeing, alongside some juicy examples of visual media to get digesting…
