The Story of Looking

The acclaimed author and filmmaker’s investigation into the human gaze through history, art and science, paints an illuminating portrait of our culture.

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 tour - in words and images - through the development of the human gaze 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.

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.

Shortlisted for the Saltire Society Non-Fiction Award

“A wide-ranging history of looking, you will gaze at it in wonder.”—Ian Sansom, The Guardian, UK