Aesthetics

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The Power of Images

Studies in the History and Theory of Response

By David Freedberg

Why do people pray before images, touch them, fear them, censor them, attack them, or respond to them sexually? David Freedberg argues that such behavior is not a marginal residue of superstition but evidence of a fundamental feature of visual experience: viewers frequently react to representations as though the depicted person or power were somehow present. Drawing on material from classical antiquity, Christianity, European popular devotion, legal punishment, magic, erotic art, and iconoclasm, he shifts attention from style and attribution to what images cause people to feel and do. Pilgrimage objects, votive offerings, effigies, visions, wax figures, and celebrated paintings consequently belong to one history of response. The book challenges the disciplinary boundary between “high art” and supposedly crude or irrational image use, proposing that embarrassment and aesthetic convention often conceal the bodily, emotional, and behavioral force of seeing.

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Ways of Seeing

Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger

By John Berger

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger examines how social conventions, technology, ownership, gender, and commerce influence the interpretation of visual images. Beginning with the transformation caused by photographic reproduction, he argues that paintings no longer remain confined to a single place or ritual setting: they can be copied, cropped, enlarged, captioned, and combined with other images, changing what viewers think they mean. Berger then turns to the European nude, where he distinguishes between living in one’s body and being arranged for another person’s inspection. He also interprets oil painting as a visual language closely connected to property and possession, before comparing its legacy with the promises made by modern advertising. Combining written and image-only essays, the book teaches readers to question not merely what a picture depicts, but who controls its presentation, what interests its conventions serve, and how the viewer’s own circumstances participate in meaning.

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