Cultural Geography

scaling and mapping, and its representation in

visually realistic images have been continuously

refined through the mechanization of vision.

Technology has increased the significance of

vision as the principal means of experiencing

space. Among the most significant advances

have been photography in the nineteenth century

and powered flight in the early twentieth century.

Photography’s invention and development were

intimately connected with making stage-sets,

panoramas and moving dioramas – dramatic

painted landscapes which were illuminated by

spectacular chemical effects such as limelight.

And the pictorial conventions of landscape paint-

ing were rapidly applied to its photography and

later moving film. Powered flight further dis-

tanced the viewer from the land surface while

offering to the observer the ability to view land-

scape at the scale and angle conventionally asso-

ciated with the map. Invention of the airborne,

automatic camera allowed World War I pilots to

film extended strips of land, transforming local

mapping and landscape appreciation (Cosgrove,

2001). It paralleled Hollywood’s use of the

movie camera to play landscapes of the

American West as principal actors in a modernist

epic of struggles over land and life. The aesthetic

conventions of landscape have been continu-

ously reinforced by developments in mechanical

and prosthetic vision, which today dominates

much of our waking lives through television,

video, film and advertising images. Mechani-

cally produced views and images of space as

landscape have further evolved into satellite

pictures, remote sensed images, interactive simula-

tions and other advanced graphic technologies,

offering strategists, planners and the private

citizen a privileged eye across the globe’s topo-

graphy, scaled, located and manipulated virtually

at will. Visual reality (VR), used by military

strategists, in CAD applications by architects and

planners, in movies and personal entertainment

packages, allows complex imaginary topogra-

phies and landscape morphologies to be con-

structed in the virtual space ‘behind’ the

computer screen surface, and offers the illusion

of entry and frictionless movement through these

spaces (Hillis, 1994). The eye alone traverses

VR landscapes, and while connected techniques

allow other bodily senses to be stimulated, the

physical action of the body’s limbs is more or

less eliminated in favour of a purely aesthetic

experience.

MAKING THE PICTURED

LANDSCAPE

The evolving relationship between vision, tech-

nology and landscape is not a morally or politi-

cally neutral affair. Privileging vision as the

principal means of knowing the world devalues

alternative modes of experience and cognition,

and when the object of knowledge involves

nature, as in the case of landscape, this privileging

and devaluation extends broadly: geographically,

socially and environmentally. Further, images do

not merely represent a prior reality, they are

powerful agents in shaping that reality (Cosgrove

and Daniels, 1988; Mitchell, 1994). Thus, as the

mechanization of vision has helped individuals

look at actual scenes with eyes trained by pictorial

images, so the patterns and forms of the external

world have been altered to correspond to the con-

ventions of pictorial landscape. I shall examine

this process before turning to some of the conse-

quences of landscape vision and action.

LANDSCAPE AND THE EUROPEAN SENSE OF SIGHT 257

Figure 12.5 Map with the Chain, woodcut map of Florence after Francesco Rossellini, c. 1500 (Staatliche

Museen zu Berlin)

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