100 Books Like About Looking

Who among us has never felt shame? Who has never felt one’s spirit crushed? I myself have returned for relief from that periodic loss of inner spirit to this brave, unsentimental memoir of the ravages on Lucy Grealy’s face of a disease that condemned her to a punishing self-loathing.

Reading this boldly unabashed memoir of conquering shame, of finding an “inner eye” (and inner life) that could come to see as beautiful what the seeing eyes of the world saw only as ugly, I have felt buoyed by the possibility of reclaiming your own true self against the ravages of a hostile world. 

One of the few true geniuses in sociology, he lifted the field up into new and innovation dimensions. If there were a Nobel Prize in sociology, he would most likely get it, followed by the three people above (Merton, Mills, and Gouldner). I knew him well. He could walk into a room and an hour later tell you all the power plays, conflicts, and inside dope.

Some of his terms have entered our language: front-stage, back stage (meaning what goes on in front of an audience, meaning your social interactions) are different from what goes on backstage, behind the scenes, kind of like a play. His book, Stigma, is used in many fascinating ways; not just someone blind or disfigured but also a Black person, a gay person, or a hippy; but mostly he shows in terrifying ways, how people hide or cope with their “stigma”—the subtitle tells it all… show more.

The relentless and erudite work of Arendt never ceases to challenge me. In the books included here—Thinking and Willing—she explores what it means that the self knows itself to be a self, and how that knowledge refracts and splits upon encountering others, and then changes when returning to solitude again. I read her knowing that she has not just considered but felt her ideas. “To be alive means to be possessed by an urge toward self-display. . . .Up to a point we can choose how to appear to others.”

A short, powerful investigation of how we construct and succumb to the lies of gender. Chu explores our fears of desire and how we allow politics to corrupt identity, believing gender to be so constructed that it can only be given and not created. Female is a quality we all carry, whatever label we use. Chu forces the reader to look in the mirror with a question instead of a statement, always uncertain about who that person really is. 

This is a classic book by German-born psychologist Rudolf Arnheim, in which he lays out the principles underlying our perception and understanding of works of visual art.  One of the major principles discussed is the human tendency to see the simplest form possible in any visual array. This ‘simplicity principle’ is also used to explain the intelligence and inventiveness of children’s art. In a brilliant chapter called Growth, Arnheim shows us that children are not striving towards realism; rather they are trying to create the simplest possible recognizable structural equivalent for the object they are representing.  The inventiveness with which children reduce complex forms to simple structural equivalents requires far more intelligence than mindless copying.  

In the late 1990s, when I was writing a short history of the Phaidon Press–a pioneer imprint of art books both affordable and beautiful—I used to visit Gombrich at his home in north London. His own career as art historian was entwined with Phaidon’s fortunes. I asked him if it were true that he used to get an adolescent to read his texts to check for clarity of expression.

The legend was exaggerated, of course. But Gombrich’s prose still strikes me as admirably free of academic obfuscation, and this book is filled with lucid discussion of what is happening, perceptually and psychologically, when artists invite viewers into their ‘worlds’.

This book outlines how the visual field operates at a psychological level.

I am an architect and cannot believe that we don’t teach straight from this and other Arnheim books more often. If you want to know what is happening to you, why you get chills up your spine when looking at art, read this book.

Arnheim is a psychologist, not a designer, so he breaks art down from this perspective.

Our society places a premium on verbal thinking, but over the course of my career, I’ve had the pleasure of learning from neurodivergent children who see the world around them in images and use those images to solve mundane and complex challenges alike. This book by Temple Grandin has helped me to shift my own mindset as a verbal thinker and appreciate the abilities of those who think in more abstract, non-linear, and systemic ways.

As a BCBA and pediatric neurologist, having the opportunity to hear directly from Grandin, who is autistic, is invaluable. I share her perspective that we do autistic people–and society as a whole–a great disservice when we relegate visual thinkers to the sidelines instead of empowering them to be the artists, designers, engineers, inventors, mechanics, and innovators our world desperately needs.

Crary’s work provides a theoretical and empirically informed synthesis of the work of theorists like Berger, Debord, Baudrillard, Barthes, and Sontag. Like these earlier writers, the technological transformations of visual culture are at the heart of the social transformations of the modern world. To understand modernity is thus first to make sense of its visual logics, procedures, and practices. This general argument allowed the author to enter the granular historical details of how seeing and 'observation’ have become essential to the concerns of modern life. What he calls 'techniques of the observer’ are in fact the core sensory apparatus that has helped to shape the institutions and practices of modern life.

What can be visualized is correlated to the technical affordances and historical development of representational practices. This makes technologies of the visual central to social analysis. Some of the most powerful drivers of modern life are thus linked to… show more.

I have loved painting since I was a boy.

Wollheim teaches that this is largely, if tacitly, a philosophical interest, in particular, an interest in philosophy in mind, depth psychology, and meaning. That is why pictures fascinate us in the way they do. It is the very opposite of deconstructionism; the facts of history, artistic intention, psychoanalysis, and perception make something urgently real out of painting.