I found the most helpful revelation on the page change from 27 to28. This chapter is interesting, though it meandersa bit. Though hedoesn't push it this far, it seems that a similar argument might be helpfulin ascertaining the effects of the endlessly reproducible digital imagewhich can be accessed at will. As an example, Berger discusses a painting which isshown on the television screen and which is thus simultaneously presentinside the houses of potentially millions of viewing subjects. It carries less absolutemeaning or, as Berger says, 'its meaning multiplies and fragments intomany meanings' (19).

It was no longer possible to imagine everythingconverging on the human eye as on the vanishing point of infinity' (18).Thus, the meaning or signification of a photographic image as comparedto a prior painted image, is decentered, diffuse.

Following Walter Benjamin's argument in 'The Art Objectin the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,' Berger argues that the technologiesof photography and motion photography work to divest the image of its priorclaim to a perspectival centrality: 'What you saw was relative to yourposition in time and space. Everything converges on to the eye as to the vanishing point ofinfinity' (16). 'Perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visibleworld.

In the act of viewing, we situateourselves in the image we view, thus taking on a special, perspectivalrelationship to the things viewed. The visual also acts in a particular way to situate the viewer,both through the perspective of the image in question and through the culturaland historical context of that image. Thus,from the beginning, words are a reduction of the image, an attempt to capturethrough language the essence of something that will inevitably elude thatattempt.

Berger opens by claiming for the image a priorand more central place in the human sensorium: 'It is seeing which establishesour place in the surrounding world we explain that world with words, butwords can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it' (7). Chapter 1 7-34.In this introductory chapter to Berger's popular book, he articulates aset of concerns with images, both photographic and painted or drawn, andwith their relation to text. Berger, Ways of Seeing, Chapter 1(abstract)

Walter benjamin ways of seeing