John Berger's Ways of Seeing: How Images Shape Our Reality
Chapter 1 of Ways of Seeing by John Berger
In Chapter 1 of Ways of Seeing, John Berger argues that seeing precedes words and that images embody a way of seeing. He critiques art historians who mystify the past, using Frans Hals's Regents paintings as an example of how assumptions about art obscure social and historical context.
The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.