Considering John Berger bases some of his philosophy of image in “Ways of Seeing” on Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” essay, I want to take a closer look at how the two differ and how they intertwine in thought. In particular, I would like to look at Benjamin’s points on the “aura” of a performer and the “artificial build-up of personality outside the studio,” and juxtaposed that alongside Berger’s analysis of the way women and men are portrayed; in particular how women are portrayed and therefore how Berger proposes how women perceive themselves.
In the post-mechanical society that we live in today, the after-effect of the creation of the machine on one’s own self-image has become superficial. I believe that Walter Benjamin and John Berger would agree that one’s own self-image, with the help of modern mechanical reproduction, is manipulated so that one feels “good” or “comfortable” with their self-image. I’ll take this argument further and state that, in most cases, self-image because of modern mechanical reproduction is meant to inflate one’s ego and self-perception.
Benjamin, who wrote his essay “Mechanical Reproductions” almost forty years prior to Berger’s “Ways of Seeing,” suggested that actors (performers) in film loose a certain “aura” that is created and possessed by those who perform in theater productions on stage. The relationship between an audience of the theater becomes a personal one connected to emotion and thought, due to distance, whereas the audience of a film becomes connected to the visual and the physical look of something as oppose to the emotional performance. This is not to say that flat lined performances are expected in film. There are plenty of film performances that exist where the performances are highly emotionally engaging, but, the performers, for the most part are themselves nice to look at. Because of this the “aura” that Benjamin says is lost from a performance must than be created in an “artificial build-up outside that studio.” As we see these today, these are the A-list personalities that are meant to sell Blockbuster films. These “auras” or “personalities” are a perfect example of the “gazes” that Berger talks about.
Berger asserts that these gazes are what affect the cultural perceptions of what it means to be a “man” and a “woman.” These stipulations about what it means to be a man and a woman have existed in art-form from the earliest forms of art: religious art; where women were meant to serve men and men were meant to represent power. We see this in film stars of today: men are built-up outside the studio to represent their action hero status while women are portrayed to be beautiful, side-kicks, muses and love interests for men. With the machine now in play, women are more so comparing themselves against other women and furthermore with the machine and the growth in accessibility of images; women are now comparing themselves to their own selves.
Another comparison of Berger and Benjamin’s analysis on machine and image is the movement from religion to politics of an image. Where as paintings were so rare and it took a process to obtain an image through the use of oil-paint, there was a ritual, a spiritual honor towards the completion of a painting. Now, with machines the image is democratized – anyone can have an image of themselves with a machine. Therefore, the mechanical reproduction of image is allowing our society to become more superficial and ego-inflated. Following Berger’s analysis this is particularly noticeable in women due to the way women have been portrayed since the beginning of time: as the beautiful, servant, love-interest, muse; beneath the man. Because after-all isn’t that what every man wants?
*This post was written in conjunction with the Integrated Media Theories class overseen by Professor Eric Gordon in the Graduate School of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College.
Red Gypsy 
But surely, your line of argument would be closer to Adorno’s thoughts than Benjamin who remained an optimist that cinema would create a politics of change, while your thoughts veer rather towards the mechanization and in a certain light, the death of the subjectivity of women.