Ways of Seeing (Penguin Modern Classics)

Everything publicity shows is there awaiting acquisition.

Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable.

Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked – and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people. Later still the specific vision of the image-maker was

Hack work is not the result of either clumsiness or provincialism; it is the result of the market making more insistent demands than the art.

Understandably, the masses remain uninterested and sceptical.

(Men in seventeenth-century Holland wore their hats on the side of their heads in order to be thought of as adventurous and pleasure-loving.

struggling with the very language of his own art as understood by the tradition of his calling.

No other kind of relic or text from the past can offer such a direct testimony about the world which surrounded other people at other times. In this respect images are more precise and richer than literature.

By refusing to enter a conspiracy, one remains innocent of that conspiracy. But to remain innocent may also be to remain ignorant.