The story of looking / Mark Cousins.

Includes index.

Starting to look: focus, space and colour -- Developing looking: eye contact, movement, landscape and emotion -- Looking, self, home and design: the things nearby -- Growing up looking: desire, abstraction and God -- Looking and cities: vicinity and vista -- Expanding horizons from the middle ages onwards: trade, crusade, empire and conquest -- Looking and science: not imposing a story -- Image war and the power of looking in the 1500s and 1600s: Protestantism, the Baroque, the Ottomans and Versailles -- What lies beneath: laughing and tears -- Looking and the 1700s: Grand Tours, enlightenment, industry, revolution and flight -- Looking and the early 1800s: Romanticism, America, railroads and photography -- The transparent eyeball; looking and the late 1800s: literature, light bulbs, Impressionism, cinema and sport -- The sliced eyball of the early twentieth century, part 1: microcosms, time and Tutankhamun -- The sliced eyeball of the early twentieth century, part 2: protest, Modernisms, skyscrapers and advertising -- The twentieth century losing its realness?: motorways, war, TV, celebrity and want see -- The twenty-first century and everywhere: skype, surveillance, virtual and augmented realities -- The unseen; looking back; looking and dying; being looked at.

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. -- 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.