enquiry, but the issues it signals continue to
animate geographers concerned with articulat-
ing theoretical claims with empirical particu-
lars (see Burt, 2006). dg
image ‘According to ancient etymology the
wordimageshould be linked to the rootimi-
tari’ (Barthes, 1977). Thus we go to the heart
of a problem first posed in Pliny’sNaturalis
Historia, later refined by Renaissance aestheti-
cians and subsequently up-ended by modern-
ists and postmodernists alike. Is the image
(eikon) a particular kind of medium through
which the world is most persuasively relayed
to our understanding? Or is the image a
graphic language that ‘invisibly’ encodes
whole systems of value – a history, geography,
a morality, anepistemology? Whatever the
case, to consider the image is to be aware of
a trick of consciousness: an ability to see
something as ‘there’ and as ‘not there’ at the
same time; to appreciate that while the image
might duplicate reality, it is itself not ‘real’.
With the status of the mimetic challenged by
both the conceptualism of twentieth-century
Western art and the critical charge launched
by the textual or ‘cultural turn’ from the
mid-1970s onwards, the image is now most
commonly considered as a cultural encoding
of a particular kind: as visual mode that in-
volves the intervention of language and thus
relies on those arbitrary, though convention-
alized, signs to be accessed and read cor-
rectly. The image, in this sense, is what
displays itself most and hides itself
best. Accordingly, much contemporary geog-
raphy (Daniels, 1993; Duncan and Duncan,
1992; Cosgrove, 1998 [1984]) has focused on
the ideological force and function of the
image; the ways in which by rooting itself in
the apparent obviousness of the visible, the
image effectively conceals the practices of
its making.
But the power of the image does not consist
merely in being a vehicle for interrogating
what it occludes or for interpreting the rela-
tionship between expressed visual content and
external or referential context. The image also
interprets us. It does so in the sense that our
attempts to understand the precepts and prac-
tices within we make our critical, political and
epistemological choices are organized by tacit
images, by a panoply of visual structures (e.g.
the photographic ‘freeze’, cinematic mobility,
digital malleability and its global relay)
through which we create our orders of time,
space and subjectivity (seefilm;vision and
visuality).
What emerges is a vast aggregate of things
that go by the name of the image, deputized
across a variety of methodologies, institutions
and disciplines. Thus while some contempor-
ary geographers have been concerned with the
encoding and deciphering of pictorial or tech-
nological images (e.g. landscape painting or
photography), others have examined imagery
in its proper or literal sense (graphic or plastic
artefacts such asmaps, diagrams,monuments
and buildings). More abstractly, geography
has considered various metaphorical exten-
sions of the concept at work within literature
(the image as ornamented language in travel-
writing, for example), epistemology (the image
as idea in the ‘eye of the mind’), physics (the
image in optical theory), psychoanalysis (the
image as dream, memory, fantasmata) and
even, conceivably, within the possibilities of
biotechnology(the genetic code-as-image).
While it is impossible for so many category
definitions to settle into comfortable coexist-
ence, contemporary debates about the image
share a degree of critical consensus: a rejection
of truth as a matter of accurate imaging and an
understanding, instead, of its cultural signifi-
cance, historical circumstance and its power
as epistemological constituent. All images,
whether visual, graphic, textual, perceptual or
psychic, are thus viewed as reflective medi-
ations of objects, concepts and affects. Ac-
cordingly, all are disorderly and riddled with
error. The misconception, then, is to think
that we can know the truth about the world
by knowing the right images of it. But the
other misconception is to think that we can
know anything about the world without im-
ages. One need not favour the postmodern
conviction of reality as a depthlesssimula-
crum(Baudrillard, 1983), nor want to oppose
such cynicism with a more corporeal and per-
formative approach (seeperformativity), to
acknowledge that since the image is all we have
to work with, we need to regard it not only as a
site of semiotic or perceptual convention but as
a starting point for a dialogue with convention
that leads us to its limits. This includes investi-
gating what might lie outside or beyond the
image, as well as thinking about the relation of
the image to the non-image, of vision to not-
seeing, to invisibility and even to blindness.jdSuggested reading
Crary (1990b); Melville and Readings (1995);
Rose (2001).imaginative geographies Representations
of other places – of peoples and landscapes,Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_I Final Proof page 369 31.3.2009 7:05pmIMAGINATIVE GEOGRAPHIES