Add together my own visual experiences, and all those who, like me, are slow readers, as well as great lookers like Cézanne and powerful, elite ones like Cleopatra, and we start to get a sense of the richness of visual experience. Our guided tour begins. What will be its methods?
Let’s start with what it will not do. In my research I have read academic books about the psychology of looking, vision in French philosophy, power and imagery and so forth. I have learnt from the content of each, but not their form. Too often, for me, such books are commentaries on other commentaries, debates within debates. They feel like gatherings of thinkers – Socrates, Descartes, Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Susan Sontag, etc. – sitting at some grand dinner party or academic conference, or standing in Raphael’s great fresco The School of Athens, debating. This book hopes to be less static and more mobile than that. It will be a road movie rather than a dinner party. On the way we will meet some of the people just mentioned, but rather than settle down with us in a 100-page colloque, they will give us advice and point us onwards. It is a book by an image-maker rather than a word-maker. It is about the act of looking: what, when and where we see, and the effects it has. In his book The Living Eye, Jean Starobinski captures the drama of this when he talks of the ‘expectation, concern, watchfulness, consideration and safeguard’ of looking.
This book will not be a comprehensive history of looking. It would take a thousand such volumes to describe all the looking we have done, the billions of glances, the aesthetics of those glances and their effect. Instead our story will zoom in on certain points in time, create a montage of moments in human looking, and hope that they can represent the rest. What happened visually when Mount Vesuvius erupted, or when that urban jewel Baghdad was destroyed in 1258, or when the modern Olympic Games took place, or when Pablo Picasso tried to imagine his response to the German and Italian bombing of the Basque town of Gernika on 26 April 1937? Such moments have left traces. They have watermarked our cultures.
Psychologists and neuroscientists had made great discoveries about child development and how looking takes place in the deep structure of our brains. I have gained a lot from such research, but have not attempted an account of it here. Instead, I dip into these disciplines where they substantially enlighten my theme. I start with the birth of a child, but join the dots with other things that seem revealing.
Most histories are still written by people like me – white, Western men – but, as in my previous work, I will try not to tell only a Western story or a male story or a white story. Combining the history of individual looking with that of our species’ looking will mean that my story will shift between short and long timelines, between micro and macro.
Finally, I will follow another lead from Cézanne. His scribbled letter suggests that our looking is not just everything we have seen, it is how we have seen it and what we have done with that seeing. Looking is also apprehension of space; it is walking, detection, longing, dissection and learning. It is our visual shocks, the way our emotions are triggered by the visual world. It is the number of times we have looked at a child or partner or sibling, plus the feelings that looking caused us to have, plus how we stored those feelings, plus how we access them now.
For example, below is an old phone of mine. It no longer works, but I keep it because there is a photo on it of my granny lying dead in her coffin.
It is not the done thing to take photos of dead relatives at funerals, but I wanted to and, when I found myself alone in the chapel of rest, I took the picture. I looked at it once or twice, and then my phone died, and so I could do so no more. I have seen quite a few dead bodies in my time, and I have looked at Egyptian mummies, and the bodies of Lenin and Chairman Mao, and I have seen lots of dead animals. But I have only photographed one corpse, my granny’s. This old phone, therefore, contains part of my looking life. The images are now for ever locked inside it, the way the images of all the dead things I have seen are locked inside me.
Not everyone can see of course. Two hundred and eighty-five million people are visually impaired, and of those thirty-nine million are blind. Ninety per cent of them have a low income, and eighty-two per cent are over fifty. If you are rich, white or young, you are more likely to see. Some who are blind, and whose sight is reparable, have rightly rejected the opportunity to see because they love their sensory engagement with the world as it is, and they do not want a new, outside, facility to intrude.
I hope they will not begrudge what follows: an affirmation of something that most of us take for granted, a complicated triangle whose points are the outside world, the eye and the brain. Let’s start by saying how limited human sight is.
If this line represents the spectrum of electromagnetic waves that exist, of which visible light is a part,
here is how much we can see:
–
The rest
is invisible to the human eye. A cat sees far more, as do many devices: infrared cameras, X-ray machines, electron microscopes, etc.
Let’s narrow life down to that small, glorious bit which is visible to the human eye. This
–
is a world.
The visible world. The world of Cézanne, Cleopatra, my dead granny, trees outside your bedroom window on a luminous morning, and everything you have seen.
Let’s look at it.
PART 1
STARTING
CHAPTER 1
STARTING TO LOOK: FOCUS, SPACE AND COLOUR
‘If I could alter the nature of my being and become a living eye, I would voluntarily make that exchange.’
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise
FOCUS
We should start where everything started. The Big Bang did not bang. Initially at least, there was no medium through which the sound waves could travel. It could be seen, except there was no one to do the seeing. It was not the Big Bang, it was the Big Flash. The rapid expansion from quantum dimensions 13.8 billion years ago is likely to have produced so much light that the Big Flash was the brightest thing that has ever happened. It made looking possible. The seen began.
Billions of years after the Big Flash, human see-ers began too. They had missed the most visible event in history, but by the time of their arrival life had evolved to a dazzling degree. Humans looked out into the world via two swivelling, vulnerable, aqueous orbs. They were astonished, these eyeballs, and astonishing. In each, 120 million rods were able to assess brightness and darkness in five hundred gradients. Seven million cones would, in time, be able to register a million colour contrasts.
How does the photo album of our life begin? With blank pages. Let’s imagine the birth of an early Homo sapiens in Africa about 200,000 years ago. She lies on her father’s hand, looks out into the world and begins to lay down visual impressions. The baby’s big, absorbent eyes start to live. The first things that register are incomplete. Where the optic nerve attaches to the retina at the back of the eye there is a blind spot, a hole in what it sees, which will be there throughout her life. She has no