Description

In The Story of Looking, Mark Cousins takes us on a lightning-bright tour – in words and images – through how our looking selves develop over the course of a lifetime, and the ways that looking has changed over the centuries. From great works of art to holiday photos, from cityscapes to cinema, through science and history, protest and propaganda, and the refusal to look, this book illuminates how we construct as well as receive the things we see.

Publisher Review

A wide-ranging history of looking . . . you will gaze at it in wonder * * Guardian * * A history of the human gaze . . . Illuminating . . . Roams freely across history, art, film, photography, science and technology . . . Indispensable as a reference book * * Observer * * Bloody genius -- CHRISTOPHER DOYLE Intriguing and beautiful . . . [A] gloriously haphazard intellectual scrapbook . . . Wide-ranging, deep-seeing and clever * * Scotland on Sunday * * An attempt to catalogue how and why we look, what we look at and how our social and cultural surroundings shape what we see . . . the result is, by turns, learned, often surprising . . . Fascinating * * Glasgow Sunday Herald, Arts Books of the Year * * Brilliant . . . His taste is eclectic and his judgments precise and persuasive * * New York Times * * Extraordinary . . . Visually ensnaring and intellectually lithe * * Telegraph on The Story of Film * * Dazzling in its breadth and intelligence . . . A hugely impressive work by a uniquely talented storyteller * * Guardian on A Story of Children and Film * *