Visual Ignorance: Seeing Meaning in a World of Images That Has Left Us Blind

We are the most visually saturated society in history, and arguably the least visually literate. Visual Ignorance argues that our capacity for genuine visual understanding (the kind our ancestors brought to a cave wall or a woven pattern) has been steadily hollowed out, even as the sheer volume of images around us has exploded.

The book traces this transition as a historical arc: from prehistoric symbolic marks on stone, weaving and pottery, through the rise of portraiture and photography, i...