Ways of [Not] Seeing

I am making a wave of final revisions to my dissertation prior to depositing it. One of my revision tasks is to provide a bit more metacommentary about the images I discuss, to elaborate on how I chose the images and how I know that they show what I say they do. Pursuing that revision task, of course, has me thinking about whether I do, in fact, know what I am seeing, or rather, what serves as convincing evidence (even to myself) that I have seen in a way consistent with the historical period and geographical location about which I write.

I know already that seeing is not, as it were, transparent. It is highly contextual. I was reminded of that recently as I re-read portions of John Berger's classic collection of essays Ways of Seeing. In one of those essays, Berger discusses a photograph showing three men, dressed in suits, standing on a country road. Much of Berger's point hinges on his assertion that those men do not usually wear suits, they are peasants. He points to their posture and to the ways that the suits fit as well as to their hands and faces to suggest that these men are, in a sense, in costume, removed from the everyday of typical peasant life. To cement his point, Berger offers another photo, this one of a group of aristocrats dressed in suits. Berger points out not only the quality of how the suits fit, but also what he describes as the obvious comfort of the men in their suits. He suggests that the suits and the men look right together (apologies for not having the photos, they don't appear to be available online).

I'm away from my bookshelves right now and have forgotten Berger's overall point, but his reading of the images has stuck with me, in large part because that reading was largely opaque to me. Confronted with the comparison, I was able to, up to a point, sort out the differences between the aristocrats and the peasants. Given only the original three men, I was essentially taking Berger's word for it. I could tell from the setting that the men were probably not aristocrats, that they were probably, in fact, workers dressed-up for something special. I could not, however, read the sense of comfort/discomfort in the look of the suit itself, and that inability has stuck with me, worried me ever sense.

Being back in D.C., I have had ample opportunity to observe men in suits and I believe that I have begun to understand why it is so difficult for me to see as Berger does (this realization has not, however, been particularly helpful in calming my worries about my ability to see other images). Berger was writing in the 1960s about photos from the early part of the 20th century. I read Berger and look at those pictures from the perspective of the early 21st century. In the forty-some years since Berger wrote, I suggest, the way men wear suits has shifted such that my ability to read class in cut and comfort is befuddled.

I do not know any men who regularly get suits tailored just for them. Lawyers, pastors, pipefitters ... they all wear suits of their size that they bought off a rack. Even the most high-power of the men I see walking across Capitol Hill are, I'm fairly certain, wearing suits that fit more like the peasants in Ways of Seeing than like the aristocrats. The Capitol Hill politicos may look somewhat more comfortable in their suits than those three men (the former do, after all, wear their suits every day), but they do not look so much like they were born to them. We 21st century Americans inhabit a more casual world than either the peasants or the aristocrats from Berger's photos. The smiling, talking man in a suit who sits across the coffee shop from me right now sits on a bar stool as if he were wearing jeans like his companion. His suit pants hike up to show his socks; his suit jacket pulls a bit at his shoulders; his tie is tight to his neck, but still slightly askew. This is not abnormal and this man likely wears a suit to work every day. And, more to the point, his way of wearing that suit is what suit-wearing looks like to me, even in DC's formal, quasi-aristocratic context.

My ways of seeing suits today, in other words, makes it hard for me to see the peasant men in Ways of Seeing as Berger does. I assume, because Berger has sufficient ethos in this regard, that he is seeing these photos in a way consistent with their original era, but Berger does not particularly elaborate on how he knows that the original viewers of such photos would have seen what he sees. That is unfortunate, I think, since it would be a useful model. In the absence of that model, I am left to remember how I taught myself to see Ecuadorian images from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to interrogate that way of seeing as best I can to determine how well in hews to its moment.