"Ways of seeing" Paul Delmont's critical response

In is article "ways of seeing" John Burger discusses many ideas that are surprisingly relevant to modern times despite the fact that Burger wrote this article roughly thirty eight years ago.  one of the first interesting points that Burger brings up is the concept of perception being correlated to knowledge and belief.  To back up this intriguing idea Burger creates a strong foundational argument for this point by giving the example of how men from the middle ages viewed fire much differently than most people do today because of the fact that they "believed in the physical existence of hell".  Burger is very much so an advocate of perception and vision, but on the other hand he seems to speak against the credibility and reputation of written word, although he ironically has chosen to describe his point of view with words as well as pictures.   Burger later gets into questioning the credibility and importance of vision because as he explains vision and perception are more often then not affected by assumptions about art.  I found it interesting that the assumptions that Burger described were basic ideas that most people probably feel like they have a firm understanding of, but in reality, as Burger explains, most people have different ideas of what beauty or and truth really mean.  After establishing a firm basis of perception and the way that it fluctuates, Burger begins to transition into describing the way that viewing art affects the society and its members.  According to Burger, when a person sees art, what that person is really seeing is history.  This concept is important and extremely relatable to the art of photography for obvious reasons, especially when considering the modern trend of digital photograph, although this article obviously was written long before the invention of digital photography.