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Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing

ArtLanguage

The story behind the card

John Berger was an English art critic, novelist and painter. These are the first two sentences of Ways of Seeing, a book that grew out of his four half-hour BBC television programmes of 1972, made deliberately without reverence for the art world. In the first programme he cut into a reproduction of a Botticelli painting with a scalpel on camera, to show how a detail changes meaning once it is separated from the whole. His point in this opening is simple and hard to argue with: the eye gets there first, and everything we are later told about a picture arrives to explain something we have already seen.

Türkçe oku
Görmek sözcüklerden önce gelir. Çocuk, konuşmayı öğrenmeden önce bakar ve tanır.
John Berger, Görme Biçimleri

İngiliz sanat eleştirmeni, romancı ve ressam John Berger'in Görme Biçimleri kitabı, 1972'de BBC'de yayımlanan yarım saatlik dört televizyon programından doğdu. Berger bu programlarda sanata tapınır gibi yaklaşmayı bilerek reddetti: İlk bölümde kamera karşısında bir Botticelli tablosunun röprodüksiyonunu neşterle keserek, bir ayrıntının bütünden koparıldığında anlamının nasıl değiştiğini gösterdi. Bu iki cümle kitabın açılışıdır ve savı yalın, itiraz etmesi zor: Göz oraya önce varır; bir resim hakkında sonradan anlatılan her şey, zaten görmüş olduğumuz bir şeyi açıklamaya gelir.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Ways of Seeing
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