PhotograPhy, Geography and

For more than 150 years, geographical concerns have shaped photographic practices, and photographic technologies have nurtured and documented geographical pursuits. This complex, dynamic, and mutually influential relationship between geography and photography can be studied from historical, practical, and theoretical perspectives. In 1839, two, quite different, processes for making permanent images “from Nature” were announced. These early photographic technologies offered a new way of encountering the physical and human world. Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre's method of producing a unique image on a silver-coated copper plate and William Henry Fox Talbot's paper-based negative-positive process were quickly harnessed to geographical purposes in the form of field observations, travel accounts, prints, book illustrations, and teaching aids—uses that have survived and become increasingly sophisticated in an age of geographic information systems (GIS) and digital imaging.

From the first mention of “taking photographic pictures” in Alexander von Humboldt's Cosmos (1849) to Vaughan Cornish's appreciation of landscape through photography of scenery (1946) to Denis Cosgrove's analysis of the “One-World, Whole-Earth” images from the Apollo space mission (1994), photography has played a variety of roles in the data-gathering practices, ordering mechanisms, and myth-making processes by which people have come to know the world and situate themselves in it. When first introduced, photography's ability to record, store, and disseminate information in visual form made it a natural complement to geography's long-established emphasis on observation, description, and visualization.

Difficult, messy, and time-consuming processes did not stop the first photographers from carrying hundreds of pounds of equipment on the Grand Tour, up the Nile, and into the jungles of the Yucatan. Embraced as an accessory to travel and employed to produce “man-on-the-spot” accounts, photography presented the scientific traveller and the gentleman adventurer a way to bring the world home, in visual form, for contemplation or study, [Page 2176]enjoyment, or analysis. Quickly, the camera became an instrument for acquiring or disseminating geographical knowledge in military operations, boundary and geological surveys, topographical mapping, immigration programs, tourism promotion, and ethnographic investigations. Practiced by travelers, photography mediated the personal encounter with unfamiliar places and peoples; collected by armchair travelers, photographs served as surrogates for travel and a first-hand experience of places.

Geography Lesson daguerreotype. In the 19th century, photography began to have enormous impacts on the popular sense of near and far, bringing distant worlds into the experience of large numbers of people.

Source: Claudet, A. (1797–1867). Geography lesson. Austin: University of Texas, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.

As photography became simpler, cameras got smaller, processing became commercially available, and images in full color became a reality; three forms of photography increasingly became an integral part of geographical pursuits: aerial photography, repeat photography, and photogrammetry. Employing established, standardized methods for producing and interpreting images, these applications embrace photographs as scientific data to be read, measured, and manipulated in the process of studying cultural landscape remains, establishing spatial coordinates, or observing physical landscape change. Early on, photographers carried their cameras (and their portable darkrooms) to the top of hills and tall buildings in order to record landscape views. True aerial photography was first attempted in the mid 19th century by the French photographer, Nadar, who, in 1858, ascended to a height of several hundred meters in a captive balloon to obtain a photographic bird's-eye view of the Earth, from which he planned to produce an exact topographic map. Two years later, James Wallace Black produced a view of Boston—according to Oliver Wendell Holmes, “as the eagle and the wild goose see it”—from a balloon 1,200 feet in the air. Since then, vertical and oblique aerial photographic techniques have been used to inventory and map natural and human-made features on the surface of the Earth. Today, geographical applications of aerial photography continue and multiply in the form of contemporary satellite imagery.

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