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Chapter 1 of Ways of Seeing by John Berger

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In chapter 1 of Ways of Seeing, Berger, borrowing from the ideas of Walter Benjamin, argues that our ability to reproduce art on a mass scale has fundamentally altered how we encounter it in the world.

Chapter 1 of Ways of Seeing by John Berger 1 Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight. The Surrealist painter Magritt

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