THE STORY OF LOOKING
ALSO BY MARK COUSINS
Widescreen: Watching. Real. People. Elsewhere
The Story of Film
Scene by Scene
Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary
(co-edited with Kevin Macdonald)
THE STORY OF LOOKING
MARK COUSINS
Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Mark Cousins, 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All reasonable effort has been made to identify and contact the copyright holders of the images, artwork and text printed in this publication. Any omissions are inadvertent and any party who believes their copyright has been infringed is invited to contact the publisher, who will be pleased to make any necessary arrangements at the earliest opportunity.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 911 1
eISBN 978 1 78211 912 8
Text Design: Christopher Gale
Typeset in Bembo by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1 Starting to Look: Focus, Space and Colour
CHAPTER 2 Developing Looking: Eye Contact, Movement, Landscape and Emotion
CHAPTER 3 Looking, Self, Home and Design: The Things Nearby
CHAPTER 4 Growing Up Looking: Desire, Abstraction and God
CHAPTER 5 Looking and Cities: Vicinity and Vista
CHAPTER 6 Expanding Horizons from the Middle Ages Onwards: Trade, Crusade, Empire and Conquest
CHAPTER 7 Looking and Science: Not Imposing a Story
CHAPTER 9 What Lies Beneath: Laughing and Tears
CHAPTER 10 Looking and the 1700s: Grand Tours, Enlightenment, Industry, Revolution and Flight
CHAPTER 11 Looking and the Early 1800s: Romanticism, America, Railroads and Photography
CHAPTER 15 The Twentieth Century Losing Its Realness?: Motorways, War, TV, Celebrity and Want See
CHAPTER 17 The Unseen; Looking Back; Looking and Dying; Being Looked At
INTRODUCTION
SIX a.m. I wake. My bedroom’s completely dark. I pull open the window blind and see this:
Condensation on my window, lit by the sodium street lights outside my flat. Beyond that, miles away, the dusty-pink glow of the coming morning. Navy above. A distant, leafless tree.
This watercolour, this smudged scene, comforts me. I will start writing a book today, a book about looking. Tens of thousands of words lie ahead in the coming months. Pages of words and paragraphs which will look nothing like the world, but which I will use to try to describe the world. I do not know precisely where the words will take me. I have planned this book in detail, but words have a mind of their own and can escape the plan. I will discover things as I go, I hope. Maybe you can share in the pleasure of discovery. For now, this alba, this moment before the day starts, before the book starts, I am happy just to look, to admire the navy-pink-orange, the softness of the light, the accidental elegance of the composition, the black vertical, the shallowness of focus, the consolation. No one else is looking at this exactly as I am, and if I had had a lie-in and not seen this, it would have happened anyway. The sky would still have been Turneresque, the orange light would still have backlit the condensation.
In the twenty-first century it’s valuable to think about looking, its history and impact. For more than a century now there has been an unprecedented escalation in what we see and how we see it. The visible world has been technologised. Photography, cinema, advertising, TV, the internet, Google Maps, smartphones, Skype, Facebook, satnavs, virtual reality and augmented reality constitute a deluge of new looking for our species – what, in later chapters in this book, I call the split eyeball. Back in the 1800s, photography seemed to rob places and people of some of their aura.