Reddit reviews Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series (Penguin Books for Art)

A little art appresciation? "Ways of Seeing" by John Berger. 20th Century art music: "The Rest is Noise" by Alex Ross.

Since you don't say whether you want to learn how to operate a camera or the field of photography in general and what interests you in photography in particular this is quite a stab in the dark but here are a few suggestions of books I keep coming back to or hold important.

This assumes that you have a basic understanding on how to operate a camera. If you don't, read your camera manual or something like Adam's The Camera and .


Technical advice

• Light, Science and Magic - the best theoretical book there is about understanding how light behaves and how to work with it. Its exercises are quite focused on artificial light and if you are just getting into photography it won't be easy but at the end of it you will know how to work with light artificial or natural and get to your vision or have a better understanding of other people's work.
  
• Studio Anywhere - this is not the most technical book per se (far from it) and the images are not to my taste but what it lacks in pure knowledge it makes up for with motivating you to take images no matter how little you own. This was a fun (if a bit too quick) read and is a good book to jump into when Light, Science and Magic feels like you are a profoto pack and 3 Chimera modifiers short of what you are trying to do.
  
  Theory/Motivational advice
  
  
• The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer - Great book about the history of American photography, its origin and how it flourished. This book is really easy to read and a very good way to start gaining some theoretical knowledge about the wide field of photography.
  
• Understanding a photograph by John Berger - Great collection of essays from one of the greatest art theorist and a fervent believer in photography as a medium pieced together by Geoff Dyer. Super engaging reads on a variety of topics and styles.
  
• Ways of Seeing by John Berger - An absolute must read in my opinion, not focused solely on photography but in the arts in general. The BBC series is also a great watch and its content is still as relevant today as it was when it came out.
  
• On Photography by Susan Sontag - A very important book, if not the most important when it comes to identifying the role of photography in our world. Personally found it quite hard to read but when it finally hit home it was with great impact.

Ways of Seeing

https://www.amazon.com/Ways-Seeing-Based-Television-Penguin/dp/0140135154

It was based on a TV series from BBC

Seconded, with the addition of John Berger - Ways of Seeing

The BBC show 'Ways of Seeing' which the book is based on is available streaming on Netflix and is worth the watch in my opinion.

• Susan Sontag On Photography
  
  
• Ways of Seeing by John Berger
  
  Both standard texts, but quite academic. Not exactly books for the flickr crowd.

I encountered it in Ways of Seeing, but I don't think they originated it.

John Berger's Ways of Seeing (absolutely brilliant)

Ron Carlson Writes a Story

Critical Theory Today

Wilhelm Reich-The Mass Psychology of Fascism

Amy Bloom-Normal

Tom Stoppard-Arcadia

Sara Marcus-Girls to the Front

If you liked this, you might like Ways Of Seeing by Berger, a classic art criticism text:

http://www.amazon.com/Ways-Seeing-Based-Television-Series/dp/0140135154/

Pretty eye opening to people like me who had never been exposed to the thought processes that go into making art and the formation of different movements in art.

Ways of Seeing is so, so good. There's a book, too - well worth it.

A bit dated, but a pretty famous documentary series by John Berger called Ways of Seeing has an episode on the painted tradition of the female nude. It's also a book if you're interested. It's also a book if that floats your boat.

Heidegger's pretty abstract, but he pushes against the subject/object dichotomy in art in his The Origin of the Work of Art. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex discusses women as Other at length, and she was pretty heavily influenced by Heidegger, so those might be worth looking into.

(Sorry to be slow to respond; I just got back from work.)

Thanks for your long, thoughtful comment.

My critique of the painting grows out of the long history of paintings like this and how they were used. There's a ton of writing on paintings like this -- just as there were a TON of paintings like this -- which were hung in men's bedrooms/private spaces. Such paintings might now seem pretty tame but at the time they were not. According to art historians, they were painted precisely to help with male desire. (See, for example, T. J. Clark's The Painting of Modern Life, about painting in Paris in the 19th century; the book shows page after page of paintings just like the The Massage and discusses their "uses." Another commenter here mentioned John Berger's Ways of Seeing (book or video. Or watch Hannah Gadsby's amazing Nanette on Netflix.)

But even through they seem pretty tame now, such paintings still feed attitudes about women. And the attitude toward women this painting presents is all in-line (for me) with what we are seeing now in the Kavanaugh hearings, for example: The attitude toward women of this painting, like the apparent attitude of Kavanaugh and the other "Renate Alumni" guys, is that women exist for men. Women are supposed to be passive objects for male desire.

Compare this painting to Manet's Olympia, for example, which also shows a white woman and a subservient black woman. The white woman looks directly at viewers, meeting their eyes, making it hard to think of her as just an object to look at; in the painting we discuss here, by Debat-Ponsan, the white woman's face isn't even shown. Both paintings put women of color in secondary, passive positions.

One painting alone is not going to teach men to believe that women are passive objects. But it is precisely because there are THOUSANDS of paintings like this, shown over and over and in different places, that they can teach attitudes I think we don't want to have toward each other.

So I clearly disagree with you that this painting and the current male-dominated-political drama have nothing to do with each other. This painting, as part of a long tradition of representations of women in art and film, has a large part to play in how men learn to think women are their playthings.