Ways of Seeing: 50 Years of the Male Gaze by Sofia Locke

'50 Years of Ways of Seeing' is a data narrative about the impact of John Berger's seminal book Ways of Seeing (1972). I have incorporated multiple data sets into the two A1 posters, to show how the ideas in Berger's book are still relevant, 50 years later. This project was created as part of my third year of a visual communications degree.

The first poster arranges the images reproduced in Ways of Seeing across two axes: nakedness and passiveness. Images are also grouped in ways that point viewers to relationships between the them that might not be noticied reading as a book.

The second poster layers two data sets: the number of citations on Google Scholar, and extracts from the texts citing Ways of Seeing that caught my attention. I have highlighted images and quotations to communicate the impact of Berger's work both historically, and for me personally. Therefore, this visualisation is both a quantitative account of the book's impact over time, and a poetic and personal interpretation of how Berger's way of seeing the world still rings true to me, 50 years after the book's publication.