What did the world look like through the eyes of one of the first Homo sapiens? What was the sky like that Galileo observed through his telescope? What did the astronauts of Apollo 8 see when they entered the Moon’s gravitational field? Why are we so captivated by the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa?

In The Story of Looking, Mark Cousins assembles a remarkable montage of the most significant moments in our visual history, revealing how and why our ways of seeing have changed over the centuries. We witness the dramatic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79; alongside Newton, we watch the fateful apple fall that inspires his formulation of the law of universal gravitation; we encounter the expression of suffering on the face of an enslaved African aboard a ship bound for Brazil; we imagine the reproachful glance Cézanne’s wife may have cast during one of his exhausting portrait sittings; and we stand beside Howard Carter as he discovers the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922.

From the Pleistocene to the digital age, both the ways we create images and the ways we perceive what we see have undergone profound transformations. Exploring the evolution of visual perception is, in many ways, to retrace the history of humanity itself. Part photo album, part art gallery, part road movie, and part grammar of visual language, The Story of Looking is an exhilarating journey through words and images, spanning art and literature, cinema and photography, technology and science. By the end of this journey, we will never look at the world in quite the same way again.