Читать книгу The Story of Looking - Mark Cousins - Страница 7

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. When cinema came along, its rampant visuality was seen as trivial or debasing. Television was said to tranquillise people. About thirty billion selfie photographs are now posted online each year. At the funeral of Nelson Mandela in 2013, the then Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt took a selfie of herself with Barack Obama and David Cameron, and excluding Michelle Obama. It is often said these days that Japanese tourists on a coach trip in Europe will quickly snap a photograph of a famous site then move on, or that British people abroad will similarly take a picture of something instead of actually looking at it. And parents regularly complain that their children are so glued to the multiple screens in their homes that they do not look up from them enough to enjoy the offline world. The escalation in quantity of visual information panics us. What is it doing to our brain wiring? Are we downloading our consciousnesses onto our smartphones? Are we looking too much, or in too fragmented a way? Is looking displacing thinking?

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:

In focus where everything else is out of focus; centred; causing people to fall to their knees; encrusted with gold shaped like feathers, as if she is an eagle; confidently letting her cleavage be seen; as monumental as the staircase behind her. This image tells us more about the twentieth century’s design and desire than it does about Cleopatra’s, but her looking, and being looked at, was surely as intense. She was equally at the centre of a visual force field. If only we could see Cleopatra’s looking life.

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.