The story of looking
By: Mark Cousins
Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd.
Published: 2017
Place of publication: Edinburgh, [Scotland]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 426
ISBN-13: 9781782119111
Subjects: Social aspects; Art and society; Visual perception
Description: Looking can be an act of empathy or aggression. It can provoke desire or express it. And from the blurry, edgeless world we inhabit as infants to the landscape of screens we grow into, looking can define us. In 'The Story of Looking', filmmaker and writer 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 through the centuries. From great works of art to tourist photographs, from cityscapes to cinema, through science and protest, propaganda and refusals to look, the false mirrors and great visionaries of looking, this book illuminates how we construct as well as receive the things we see. Brilliant and eclectic, 'The Story of Looking' is a photo album and an art gallery, a road movie and a visual grammar: once you've read it, you'll never see things the same way again.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Starting to look: focus, space and colour; title: Developing looking: eye contact, movement, landscape and emotion; title: Looking, self, home and design: the things nearby; title: Growing up looking: desire, abstraction and God; title: Looking and cities: vicinity and vista; title: Expanding horizons from the middle ages onwards: trade, crusade, empire and conquest; title: Looking and science: not imposing a story; title: Image war and the power of looking in the 1500s and 1600s: Protestantism, the Baroque, the Ottomans and Versailles; title: What lies beneath: laughing and tears; title: Looking and the 1700s: Grand Tours, enlightenment, industry, revolution and flight; title: Looking and the early 1800s: Romanticism, America, railroads and photography; title: The transparent eyeball; looking and the late 1800s: literature, light bulbs, Impressionism, cinema and sport; title: The sliced eyeball of the early twentieth century, part 1: microcosms, time and Tutankhamun; title: The sliced eyeball of the early twentieth century, part 2: protest, Modernisms, skyscrapers and advertising; title: The twentieth century losing its realness?: motorways, war, TV, celebrity and want see; title: The twenty-first century and everywhere: skype, surveillance, virtual and augmented realities; title: The unseen; looking back; looking and dying; being looked at.