The Story of Looking

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.

Mark Cousins is a Northern Irish author, producer and filmmaker. He is the former director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival and a regular contributor to Prospect and The Times. He is the author of the book The Story of Film and the creator of the acclaimed Channel 4 documentary series of the same name. He was Co-Artistic Director of a number of projects with Tilda Swinton, one of which involved manually hauling a portable cinema through the Scottish Highlands. He lives in Edinburgh. @markcousinsfilm

A wide-ranging history of looking, you will gaze at it in wonder -- Ian Sansom * * 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 * *