The Dictionary of Human Geography

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Suggested reading

Hinchliffe (2004).

vision and visualityThe distinction between

vision – a biologically determined structure of

seeing – and visuality – a culturally constructed

way of seeing – has not been challenged in

geographical work, despite sustained interest

inembodied knowledges(see body;situated

knowledge). Vision has been paid little atten-

tion, and questions of visuality have been most

fully engaged with by cultural geographers.

The starting point for much of their work is

that, like any other culturaltext,animage

draws on particular culturally constituted

signs, symbols anddiscoursesin order to

make its meaning. Images are thus understood

as ensembles of visual practices that structure

what is visible and invisible in specific ways.

Such practices are at work in both the visual

content of an image – what it shows – as well

as in its visual and spatial organization – how it

shows what it shows, and what position it

invites its audience to take in relation to it.

Much attention has been paid to how images

thus constitute and reconstitute socialiden-

titiesand social relations by visualisingspace,

place,nature,landscape, thenation, the

urban and the rural in particular ways. This

significant body of work has now been joined

by efforts to approach images from somewhere

other than entirely within the field ofculture.

There is now a large body of work by

cultural geographers that explores the specific

visualities that have contributed to a range of

geographical knowledges, both popular and

academic. Much attention has been paid to

the emergence of the idea of ‘landscape’in

thewestduring the fifteenth and sixteenth

centuries, for example (Cosgrove, 1984;

Olwig, 2002). This work understands land-

scape as a means of organizing the visual field

through a specific, territorializingspatiality

and a single viewpoint. Such landscapes have

been associated with bourgeois and masculine

ways of seeing the world aspropertyto be

owned and known (Cosgrove, 1985; Rose,

1993). The association of some landscapes

with national identities has also been traced

(Daniels, 1993; Matless, 1998; Olwig, 2002),

and the use of certain mapping techniques

and photographic practices in the creation of

colonial and imperial geographical knowledges

has been explored (Harley, 1989; Ryan, 1997;

see alsocartography, history of;colonial-

ism; masculinism; post-colonialism).

Indeed, Gregory (1994) has asserted the com-

plicity of geography as an emergent academic

discipline with a modern Western visuality

dependent on the possibility of a ‘world pic-

ture’. Images produced by newer visual media,

such asfilm,geographic information sys-

tems, and tourist and family photography

have also been examined as powerful means

through which more recent places and spaces

are constituted (seefilm;tourism).

While much of this work depends on claims

that particular images are given their meaning

by their historically and geographically specific

context, or by their embeddedness in contem-

porary discourses (see visual methods),

Marxist strands of work also continue. Some

pursue Harvey’s (1989b) claim that many vis-

ual objects reflect changes in the time–space

organization of contemporarycapitalism,and

otherspursueDeutsche’s (1996b) somewhat

lessreductionistaccount of the importance

of design,artandspectacleto the capital’s

redevelopment of cities (seegentrification).

It is, however, possible to suggest that most

geographers concerned with visuality have been

concerned to place specific images into their

‘context’, whether that context be a culture,

discourse or the demands of capital.

However, two other approaches to visuality

are now also evident in geographical work.

First, some geographers are arguing that

while certain sorts of images participate in

the cultural or discursive, they can also on

occasion exceed it. This claim refers to photo-

graphs quite specifically, because of the way

something of what photographic technologies

do is to describe the world mimetically,

beyond cultural signification (seemimesis).

Geographers such as Goin (2003) and

Edensor (2005) thus insert photographs of a

desert and of industrial ruins into their written

text, in order to enact the intrusion of those

places’ non-human, non-cultural agencies into

the making of geographical knowledge.

Second, others are suggesting that the effects

of images can only be understood as they are

encountered by viewers in particular places in

quite specific ways (Rose, 2004a). This argu-

ment understands images as performed in

encounters with people, and is less concerned

with what images mean than with what they

do and what is done with them (seeperfor-

mativity). Hence geographers and others

have explored how images are put to work in

different places, and the various spaces and

places that such work produces (Pinney,

2003; Rose, 2004a).

These moves (back?) towards understand-

ing images not as texts to be read but as

objects to be put to use has also begun to

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_V Final Proof page 801 30.3.2009 7:45pm

VISION AND VISUALITY