Ways of Seeing

As someone who is interested in the arts, and photography specifically, I found ways of seeing to be unpredictably entertaining.

One of the ideas that were discussed that particularly caught my interest was the concept of freezing a moment of pertinent emotion, without the image looking banal. How does one capture the exact emotion that the artist is trying to convey. One of the most difficult, the book says, is that of capturing a motion. There was one quote which described it pretty well: “In livid sexual experience, nakedness is a process rather than a state. If one moment of that process is isolated, it's image will seem banal and it's banality, instead of serving as a bridge between two intense imaginative states, will be chilling” (Berger 60).

The author used an image by Rubin, one of his second wife pulling on a fur coat; you knew that she would at no other time be caught as she was. “Her body confronts us, not as an immediate sight, but as experience” (61). I liked the idea of a caught moment with so much passion and how the artist needed to incorporate all these other things that our other senses would normally pick up and we wouldn’t need to see visually.
 
I also liked the chapter on publicity and how it is “selling the past to the future [...] so all it’s references to quality are bound to be retrospective and traditional” (139). The way human beings interact with one another is shown over and over again, in different settings or environments. “[Publicity] would lack both confidence and credibility if it used strictly contemporary language” (61).

I’m learning more and more that I’m really very interested in the advertising side of things,in the buying and selling and persuading. It makes sense to me and grabs my attention. I guess it is in some ways helping me understand where I’m getting all these morals and urges to buy things too.