Photography, Geography and

For more than 150 years, the relationship between geography and photography has been complex, dynamic, and mutually influential. This relationship, in which geographic concerns have shaped photographic practices and photographic technologies have nurtured and documented geographic pursuits, 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 geographic 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 photographic pictures in Alexander von Humboldt's Cosmos in 1849, to Vaughan Cornish's appreciation of landscape through photography of scenery in 1946, to Denis Cosgrove's analysis of the whole-earth images from the Apollo space mission in 1994, photography has played a variety of roles in the data-gathering practices, ordering mechanisms, and myth-making processes by which[Page 355] 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 so-called “man on the spot” accounts, photography presented the scientific traveler and the gentleman adventurer a way in which to bring the world home, in visual form, for contemplation, study, enjoyment, or analysis. Quickly, the camera became an instrument for acquiring or disseminating geographic knowledge within 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 firsthand experience of place.

As photography got easier, cameras got small, processing became commercially available, and images in full color became a reality, three forms of photography increasingly became an integral part of human geography: aerial photography, repeat photography, and photogrammetry. Employing established standardized methods for producing and interpreting such 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 landscape change. Early on, photographers carried their cameras (and their portable darkrooms) to the tops of hills and tall buildings to record landscape views. True aerial photography was first attempted during the mid-19th century by French photographer Felix Nadar, who in 1858 ascended to the height of several hundred meters in a 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—as the eagle and the wild goose see it, according to Oliver Wendell Holmes—from a balloon 1,200 feet in the air. Since then, vertical and oblique aerial photography has been used to inventory and map natural and human-made features on the surface of the earth. Today, geographic applications of aerial photography continue and multiply in the form of contemporary satellite imagery.

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