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A page from How To See: Visual Adventures in World God Never Made,.

Numbers on walls, arrows on signs. Modernist sculpture and expressway lamps. Paving stones and fire hydrants. Tire tracks and footprints. The Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, and a terminal at Newark Airport.

These are some of the places and things George Nelson assembled in How to See, a collection of images and interpretations that captures the anxious rhythm of our social-media age. Which is a remarkable feat, since it was published in 1977.

Since I came across Nelson’s book last year – it was republished in early 2017 – I’ve come back to it again and again, for the lessons that it expresses in words and, more powerfully, in images. Subtitled Visual Adventures in a World God Never Made, it is a manifesto for the art of visual literacy – which the majority of us, Nelson argued, lack. Most adults “cannot see, except in the most primitive sense, such as identifying a dog or a traffic light,” he argued.

Open this photo in gallery:

A page from How To See: Visual Adventures in World God Never Made,.

What does that mean? It’s surprisingly literal: Nelson thought people aren’t used to really seeing visual patterns, and then also we simply can’t decode much of what we see. We lack the “specialized information” about how the physical world is made: not just art, but airport terminals and fire hydrants. All these things are designed, and if “we really want to see the physical environment in which we spend most of our time, we have to understand something about design and the design process.”

Nelson, trained as an architect, was best known as a designer. His own works for the furniture company Herman Miller (the Ball Clock, the Coconut Chair) defined what’s now called mid-century modern style. But here, he was thinking about design in all senses, from fence post to city plan, with their underlying logics.

This is where the photography has lessons for us. Nelson showed us, for instance, Circles: “Beer cans, tires, manholes, traffic lights, doorknobs … you can make a long list without trying very hard.” And his images bring together a bull’s eye, knots on a tree, a wagon wheel and a constructivist painting. Human works are inspired by nature, but follow a common logic that’s just discernible. “Strips,” “Skylines,” “Spirals” – each time I flip through the book’s barrage of images I start to see commonalities between apparently unrelated things.

Or, the shorter version: I start to see.

Open this photo in gallery:

A page from How To See: Visual Adventures in World God Never Made,.

It’s important to remember that Nelson wasn’t, at root, an artist. He was an amateur, with a trained eye, a camera and a remarkable persistence for capturing what he saw as he flew, drove and walked around the globe.

In other words: He’s us, and we are him, snapping away and archiving our visual encounters with the world. A quarter-century before photo bloggers, 35 years before Instagram, Nelson was living through a lens, composing a view of the world through happenstance and bricolage.

And what he saw was a world coming apart. Nelson was writing during the latter years of urban renewal, in which a new logic of the automobile shaped emerging cities and was imposed on older ones. “The freeways and their interchanges are tearing the old cities apart, splitting established neighbourhoods, and introducing a new, antihuman scale and tempo.”

“Antihuman.” Here, Nelson is following in the footsteps of Jane Jacobs. But while Jacobs tended to argue about cities as organisms, Nelson was concerned about the organisms inside our heads. What was our new way of living doing to our brains? This neurological bent was shared by the Danish urbanist Jan Gehl and it continues with contemporary scholars and writers, among them the University of Waterloo’s Colin Ellard.

This line of argument has limits, but it’s powerful. It begins with the simple fact that our world is shaped by people, through a billion decisions conscious and unconscious – and that our world shapes us. Places matter. We made them, and we can make them better. All of this is dead obvious when you put it in words. It should be obvious to our eyes, too.

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