page 5 – ‘television series ways of seeing’
page 7 – ‘seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak’
page 7 – ‘It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain the world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it’
page 7 – ‘The surrealist painter Magritte commented on this always – present gap between words and seeing in a painting called The Key of Dreams’
page 8 – ‘To touch something is to situate oneself in relation to it’
page 9 – ‘Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen. The eye of the other combines with our own eye to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world.’
page 10 – The photographer’s way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject. The painter’s way of seeing is reconstructed by the marks he makes on the canvas or the paper. Yet, although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing.’
page 16 – ‘The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God’
page 19 – ‘When the camera reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image. As a result its meaning changes. Or, more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings. This is vividly illustrated by what happens when a painting is shown on a television screen. The painting enters each viewer’s house. There it is surrounded by his wallpaper, his furniture, his mementoes. It enters the atmosphere of his family. It becomes their talking point. It lends its meaning to their meaning. At the same time it enters a million other houses and, in each of them, is seen in a different context. Because of the camera, the painting now travels to the spectator rather than the spectator to the painting. In its travels its meaning is diversified.’
page 34 – ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction – Walter Benjamin (Cape, London, 1970)’
page 45 – ‘A man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible his presence is striking… The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual – but its object is always exterior to the man. A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you for you.’
page 46 – ‘By contrast, a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste – indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence.’
page 46 – ‘A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.’
page 46 – ‘Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated.’
page 47 – ‘One might simplify this by saying : men act and women appear. Men look at women Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of women in herself is made: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.’
page 51 – ‘The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralising, however, was mostly hypocritical. You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting ‘Vanity’, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.’
page 53 – ‘In his book on The Nude, Kenneth Clark maintains that to be naked is simply to be without clothes, whereas the nude is a form of art.’
page 54 – ‘To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude.’
page 130 – ‘Publicity images also belong to the moment in the sense that they must be continually renewed and made up-to-date. Yet they never speak of the present. Often they refer to the past and always they speak of the future.’
page 131 – ‘It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more. This more, it proposes, will make us in some way richer – even though we will be poorer by having spent our money.’
page 132 – ‘Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure in-itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell.’
page 139 – ‘Publicity is the culture of the consumer society. It propagates through images that society’s belief in itself. There are several reasons why these images use the language of oil painting. Oil painting, before it was anything else. was a celebration of private property. As an art form it derived from the principle that you are what you have.’
page 139 – ‘Publicity is, in essence, nostalgic. It has to sell the past to the future. It cannot itself supply the standards of its own claims. And so all its references to quality are bound to be retrospective and traditional. It would lack both confidence and credibility if it used strictly contemporary language.’
page 140 – ‘In the language of oil painting these vague historical or poetic or moral references are always present. The fact that they are imprecise and ultimately meaningless is an advantage: they should not be understandable, they should merely be reminiscent of cultural lessons half-learnt. Publicity makes all historical mythical, but to do so effectively it needs a visual language with historical dimensions.’
page 146 – ‘Glamour is a modern invention. In the heyday of the oil painting it did not exist. Ideas of grace, elegance, authority amounted to something apparently similar but fundamentally different’.