I will say that the thumbnail art can be a little hard to make out, even in the Kindle edition where it can be magnified somewhat. I don’t know whether it was used to raise the page count on a thin book, or what.

The book has strange formatting, employing bold text and thumbnail art. One of the book’s central ideas is that seeing precedes reading, and that we learned to extract information from images before we did so from words. One can see the commonality in the pictures and practice discerning what the author is trying to convey. The picture-only chapters are intriguing. Here one sees how advertising and marketing exploits these concepts. Chapter seven investigates what the author calls “publicity” and how pictures are used to evoke dissatisfaction with what is and desire to be something else. Chapter five explores the relationship between possessing and seeing, and also how everyday people begin to be rendered in art. Chapter three, for example, discusses what the differences between how men and women are depicted says about inherent societal biases. the even chapters.) The first chapter lays out the concept of ways of seeing, and subsequent chapters consider how those ideas can be applied to specific questions. The book’s seven chapters alternate text + picture chapters (the odd chapters) with ones that are only pictorial (i.e. whose perspective would the picture be from and what might the artist be saying about such a person? Also, what are the subjects looking at, and what does that convey (e.g.

This book challenges one to not just look at what’s in a picture, but to reflect upon the nature of seeing and what it tells one about the deeper meaning of a painting or photograph.

The ways of seeing book