Here, Berger indulges a somewhat puzzling penchant for reproducing artwork, advertisements, and photography without citations, and without any written contextualization. Perhaps, by openly flouting academic conventions, he means to render these artworks more accessible. Another possible interpretation of this style of presentation (in which written language is totally absent) is that he means to foreground his reader’s inherent facility with visual languages. For Berger, this facility is inherent because of his audience’s presumed status as a subject of Western capitalism, and the primacy of the visual as an arbiter of both ideology and articulation.

In function, this collection of images of women, from a myriad of historical periods, primes his audience for the proceeding chapter’s content, and also activates the almost subliminal gender ideology and messaging that he will explore in that chapter.