So it's Christmas Eve now. It's just me this year, but I don't mind. I'm planning on having some dinner and just hanging.

I saw some friends yesterday and when I was waiting for them in the bookstore I saw John Berger's Ways of Seeing on a shelf. It's a book I've been meaning to read for a long time. I've heard it referenced a few times already by some of YouTubers I watch that do media critique and knew it was on my "books I wish I've read" list. It was only 13 bucks but I already have so many books on my reading list I decided against buying it. As I sat down and googled the book I found that some hero had photocopied and scanned the book and put it online so I downloaded that bad boy and now I've been reading it.

Download the book from here if you want

It's very easy to read and I'm probably going to breeze through it. I really like some of the points he makes. Right in the beginning he mentions how television recontextualizes images in a way that changes our relationships with them. He mentions that in times of past you had to travel to like a church or some other place to see a painting, and so the painting was view in a place and time, you had to go to the image, while now with television (and even more so the internet) you have pictures come to you and they are presented in your home, through a screen, in the context of your home filled with your things that have their own context.

It's a simple enough observation, but mulling it over really makes you rethink all of the images and pictures you end up seeing on the internet. For instance I've seen my fair share of gore pics online, but seeing them in the Death Museum a few weeks ago, on display, gives those images a very different gravity. When displayed like that in a museum it's no longer a picture viewed in secret on a screen but a picture on display, you are seeing it with many others, and you can see the disgust and fear on others faces, something that's sort of shocking in it's own way.

I just got myself a museum card for next year and I'm going to take up going to museums more often now, reading Ways of Seeing goes well with this new commitment. It will be great to see some new stuff, I've really let myself isolate a little too much. The museums and exhibits I've been to this year have been some of the highlights of the year for sure.