Did you know that there are more images published every day now than there were in the whole of the 19th Century? Nicholas Mirzoeff has written a brilliant book about this fact, entitled How to See the World. Here’s Nicholas on the myriad ways in which this mass of visual information impacts our perception and creativity, and the “exciting, inspiring and anarchic” effect it might have.

In 1972, astronauts on Apollo 17 pointed their camera at the Earth far below. Quite by chance, they were the first (and so far last) astronauts to see the entire surface of the globe fully illuminated. The resulting photograph, known as Blue Marble, is said to be the most widely reproduced photograph of all time. It inspired hopes of a world government, pushed the young environmentalist movement and made the world seem a hopeful, unified place.

I look at that photograph as being in many ways the beginning of the era in which we live – a global system connected and made intelligible above all by visual culture. To say we live in a culture that visualises is an understatement. One trillion photographs were taken in 2014. 700 million Snapchat photos are exchanged every single day. Every minute no less than three hundred hours of YouTube video are uploaded.