There is some basis to these digital-age anxieties, as there was to their equivalents in the nineteenth century. But the tour that you are about to take will provide some perspective on this looking panic. It will explore the role that looking has played in our emotional, social, political, scientific and cultural development. By considering the story so far, and noticing how we encounter the visible world, I hope to provide some perspective on the storm of looking that we find ourselves in.
Of course looking is only one thing that human beings do. Our lives are tapestries of thinking, hearing, moving, laughing, loving, fearing, touching, believing, reading, playing, remembering, creating, hurting, dreaming and much more. I find myself more moved by music than any other art form, and I like dancing with my eyes closed, as looking seems to inhibit my pleasure. I feel excluded when my partner looks at Facebook when we are together and feel that smartphones have changed the eyelines in our relationship.
But these things do not prevent me from enjoying the visual storm, the wind in the trees and in my hair. In what follows I will endeavour to show the underlying richness of looking, its pleasures, discoveries and the empathy it can unlock. Helle Thorning-Schmidt’s selfie story is more interesting than it first appears, for example. Her children had just taught her how to do selfies, so perhaps she was having fun at playing a teenager. The seating at the event was mostly unreserved, so she did not know she would be sitting next to Barack Obama until he and Michelle showed up. Her picture was posey, yes, and I am sure she had one eye on its PR potential, but she also did it on the spur of the moment. The ‘look where I am!’ impulse is universal, endearing even, and a human response to time passing and memories fading. Ditto the camera-toting tourists. They have spent a lot of hard-earned money to come halfway around the world. Whilst visiting two cities a day, their phone or digital cameras become a way of dealing with the anxiety of looking, the desire to make the money and time count. Yes, they will probably bore their friends back home with their pictures of Edinburgh Castle or the Eiffel Tower, but when they look at the photographs in ten years’ time, there will be things in them – people on the same coach, a stop to have pizza and a beer, a youthful face that is now less so – that will move them and take them back to their trip. And as for the child sutured to her phone, yes it is tedious when she does that for hours, and yes, a lot of what she is looking at is rubbish, but that is not a reason for decrying screens or decrying looking. There is rubbish reading and thinking too. By looking at screens, especially if she is someone who is good at looking, a child will encounter things that will fire her thoughts. This book will not shy away from how looking can exploit, control or demean, but it is more interested in how looking has enhanced our lives.
It has certainly enhanced mine. When I was at school our English teacher made us read Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations aloud in class, a common practice which aims to give a group of children the collective experience of enjoying a novel. Many of my classmates loved the opportunity, and read fluently, even using different voices for Pip, Joe, Miss Havisham and the book’s other characters. The words seemed to leap off the page when they read. Not for me. When I looked at a page of words, they looked like this: A flat, monochrome block of granite, hard and impenetrable. I could dive into images like the photograph of the view from my bedroom window this morning. They were aqueous, inviting, seductive, layered and readable, whereas a page of text was none of these things. Looking has kept me happy, alert, informed and curious. When I am feeling down, I go out into the city where I live, and people-watch. When I am overwhelmed with work, I climb a mountain and look out to the horizon. When I am far from home, I look at photos on my phone of the person I live with, and feel better. When I have time off, I go to see art, buildings or landscapes. Looking is my consolation and calibration, and so I have built my working life on imagery. Most of my films are about looking. All of them could start with one word: ‘look’. On completing my tenth film and realising that its main character is recovering from a tragic event by looking at the city, Stockholm, in which she lives, and on noticing that my eyesight is beginning to fade and that I now need glasses, I decided to write this book.
Our art schools are full of people like me, who are more at home with images than words, as are our physics and engineering courses, rock bands and football pitches. Some people are better at looking than reading. If you are one of them, this book is particularly for you. You could be in your late teens, or studying a humanities course, or a general reader of any age. If you know a lot about visual culture then some of what follows will be old hat, and you will spot what I have not dealt with. But that is fine. This book is not an encyclopedia, but rather deliberately personal.
In what follows I will not be the only tour guide. In each chapter, painters, photographers, filmmakers, scientists or writers will also show us the world through their eyes. They will be our surrogate lookers. They have a hotline to the visual world.
One such great looker in particular will tee us off. Consider these scribbled words:
They are in a letter from the French painter Paul Cézanne to a fellow artist, Émile Bernard, written in 1905. The handwriting is swirly and a little shaky – Cézanne was coming to the end of his life – but we can just decipher it. Cézanne has written L’optique, se développant chez nous par l’étude nous apprend à voir – the optical experience which grows in us.
There is nothing unusual in a painter using the word optical, of course, given that part of their trade is looking, but Cézanne does not use the word as an objective, as in ‘optic nerve’, for example. He is implying that a person has an optical experience, and it develops over time.
What does he mean by that? I think he is saying that a human being develops a looking life. Just as we can say that our verbal vocabulary grows over the course of our life, so Cézanne means, I believe, that our visual vocabulary grows as we do. This will be the central idea in this book. Your optique, your looking, is all that you have seen: your mind’s eye, your lifelong photo album. In his Philosophical Dictionary, the French writer Voltaire said that an idea is ‘an image that paints itself in my brain. The most abstract ideas are the consequences of all the objects I have perceived.’ You and I each have such a cache of images in our heads, and so did every seeing person in history.
Imagine, for example, this woman’s:
This basalt sculpture of Cleopatra from about 40 BCE, when she was still alive, has empty eyes, but hers were far from that. Of Greek origin, she was probably the most powerful woman of her time. Powerful people see inner sanctums, vistas, masses of people turned towards them and monumental cities designed to be best seen from where they sit, and Cleopatra saw Alexandria recede into the horizon as she sailed her fleet along the coast of what is now Libya. She saw the Roman civil war, Mark Antony naked, her twins by him born, and the dying of the light as she committed suicide on 12 August 30 BCE. What a life those eyes saw, what amplitude. They were probably once filled with precious materials, but I like that they are vacant. This book will try to fill such eyes. Twenty centuries later, a famous dream factory in Southern California imagined her like this: