Ways Of Seeing

Berger opens the chapter by stating that our lives are saturated in “publicity images.” (For the purposes of this guide, “publicity”, “publicity images,” and “advertisements” are synonymous). Berger also contends that this saturation is historically unprecedented. He observes that, although we may remember or forget these publicity images, they stimulate our imaginations during the fleeting moments in which we encounter them as we conduct our everyday affairs. Publicity images themselves also belong to a unique temporality: while they must be continually renewed and updated, they rarely speak to the present. Instead, they refer to either the past or speak of the future.

We have become so inured to the presence of publicity images that we fail to recognize their impact. They have become a passively accepted fact of our surroundings. In Berger’s view, this conditioning leads us to fail to recognize that, although it is we who pass the images—during our walks in the city, while turning a page, while watching television—it is these publicity images which actually pass us. In their frenetic cycle of renewal, they are dynamic while we are static.

Berger then points out that publicity/advertisement is often invoked as a public good which generates public good by increasing freedoms: freedom of choice for the purchaser, freedom of enterprise for the manufacturer.