Reclaiming vision: looking at Berger’s Ways of Seeing and NASA’s Blue Marble

Abstract

John Berger’s warnings around the gaze in Ways of Seeing and the discourses surrounding NASA’s Blue Marble, the 1972 image of the whole Earth from space, propose a visual practice based on vision as inculcating an alienating objectivity. I return to these foundational texts from 1972 in order to produce symptomatic readings that suggest a background for certain attitudes around digital images. Introducing Donna Haraway’s notion of diffraction multiplies the interpretive identities of such texts and pushes against over identifications that limit a text’s contemporary resonance, as I explain through my discussion of Ways of Seeing and then model through various approaches to Blue Marble. My analysis identifies how attributes of each object contribute to the disappearance of the image as something one looks at, but by reclaiming vision, a new kind of critical visuality becomes available, particularly as it applies to digital culture, as I address in my conclusion.

Acknowledgements

Portions of this paper were first presented at a 2018 symposium at the Institut suisse pour l’étude de l’art (SIK-ISEA) and the Musée de l’Elysée at the Universität Bern, addressing Berger’s influence, De B à X. Faire (l’histoire de) l’art depuis John Berger, with generous advice and encouragement from the participants. Also, many thanks to Adele Kudish for an early reading, Nicole Archer for pushing me to expand the influence of Haraway, and Grace Woods-Puckett for her clarifying recommendations.

Disclosure statement

The author has no financial interest or benefit arising from this research.

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Charlotte Kent

Charlotte Kent, PhD is Assistant Professor of Visual Culture at Montclair State University. With a background in aesthetics and the history of ideas, as well as deconstruction and narrative theory, her scholarship analyzes the power structures surrounding the discourse of art, challenging the way an idea institutes itself as the primary approach and cordons off other avenues of experience.