Vision

Geography has a deep tradition as a visual discipline. In late-19th- to mid-20th-century treatises defining[Page 537] the field as a descriptive science, geographers were called to describe what they saw thoroughly and objectively. Whether the objects of this gaze were landscapes, regions, or cultures, few questioned the ability of geographers to see such objects in their entirety and to represent them to others objectively via the map and the word. Although the definition of the discipline and its methods of inquiry have changed and broadened over the past 30 years or so, the dominance of vision and the visual continues in contemporary geographic inquiry. Cultural geographers read landscapes as visual texts and note that tourists consume places through the gaze. Cartographers and geographic information scientists use high-resolution imagery and three-dimensional graphics to create geographic visualizations. And an increasing number of geographers examine the reproduction of spaces and places in a variety of visual media.

It is common to make a distinction between vision and visuality. Vision can be defined as what the human eye is physiologically capable of seeing. The ability of the eye to perceive certain wavelengths of radiation, for example, defines the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Not surprisingly, most remote sensing systems used by geographers are designed to detect, record, and image this type of radiation. Visuality refers to the cultural construction of what and how people see. Children must be taught to identify the objects they see and to interpret the meanings of the objects in their own cultural contexts. In a more political realm, groups and individuals suffering some form of oppression often work with members of the media to make their struggles visible to a larger population.

The primacy of the visual among the human senses often is presented as a characteristic of modernity in Western society. As both Martin Jay and Chris Jenks noted, the rise of printing, the reliance on the written word for communication, and the use of the telescope and microscope to bring the distant and the invisibly small into view all contributed to the tendency to equate seeing with knowing. To a large extent, the development of geography as a modern discipline rested on this assumption. Derek Gregory described how 19th-century geographers followed careful procedures to describe, classify, and map the resources and “native” peoples they saw as they worked to enlarge the West's “scientifically known” and politically controlled world.

More recent work in geography has been heavily influenced by the increasing prevalence and importance of visual images in Western society. Beginning in the 1980s, geographers have examined how place, space, landscape, and identity are represented and/or reproduced in visual media such as films, television programs, and advertisements. Much early work in this field tried to identify misrepresentations of particular places or identities by comparing the images with reality as seen/known by the geographers.

Other contemporary geographic research seeks to retheorize the relationships between vision/visuality and space, place, and landscape. Some of this work relies on postmodern critiques of the modernist relationship between sight and knowledge described earlier. If images of bodies, places, landscapes, and the entire planet are increasingly central to everyday experiences, it becomes impossible to see/know a reality outside of its representation. An individual's experience in Los Angeles, for example, may be heavily influenced by knowledge gained through previous consumption of visual images of that city on television or in films. Therefore, many cultural geographers view all visual phenomena, including material landscapes, as cultural texts that must be decoded. Gillian Rose's Visual Methodologies reviewed several approaches to such research, including content analysis, semiology, psychoanalysis, and discourse analysis.

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