Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
We can then look at the way in which the vignette is constructed as a natural thing, i.e.
the type of thing it is; immediately we say it is a print using clues from the thing itself. At
the bottom of the vignette there is a raised bank indicated in the foreground by a drawn line
that wanders freely over the surface. In contrast the moss on which the surveyors stand is
represented though a series of mechanistic horizontal lines. This representational schema
continues into the background with the delineation of the distant landscape. This insistent
horizontal hatching continues into the sky, where the clouds echo the foreground bank in
their winding construction, and yet on closer inspection can be seen to be constructed from
the same horizontal lines.
The image is still not exhausted by this analysis. Now we can examine it as a picture
thing, a thing through which something is pictured or represented. The vignette is the thing
through which we see Chat Moss. In the foreground there is a raised bank and beyond it the
moss on which we see a group of four men to the left; their dress indicates their status, the
top-hatted overseer and the flat-capped white-coated workers who operate the theodolite.
To the right a lone figure of a young boy holds the measuring staff, allowing a reading to
be made. Immediately we are given an intimation of the organizational aspect of Victorian
society through the dress and the different roles of the characters sketchily indicated. This
idea is also carried by the woods and hills indicated at the edge of the moss and the smok-
ing chimneys of encroaching industrialization beyond. The landscape scene is dwarfed by
the sky.
Let us return to an analysis of the type of image the print is - a vignette. Developed in
this Victorian form by Thomas Bewick, the vignette functions as a contemplative temporal
image. This is how the Chat Moss vignette works; its position in the topic is prior to the
written description of the scene it imagines; it calls on the viewer to think ahead to what is
to come in the following chapter, a written description of the surveying and construction of
the railway over Chat Moss. It also calls on us to think ahead in terms of the scene displayed;
following the survey comes the construction and the subsequent triumph of the Liverpool
to Manchester railway - a major milestone in the establishment of the Industrial Revolution.
In addition, the scene itself is one of temporal looking, looking into the future. The survey
is part of a process of planning; to plan is to look to the future.
As such the vignette has a relationship to our intrinsically
a-priori
understanding that
is our capacity to know things in advance of empirical experience. Within the Carte-
sian ordering of the world the
a-priori
is located purely in the subject. Phenomenology
discovers that it can be detected in both the subjective and in the objective. A further
potential understanding to be drawn from this analysis is that images operate in dif-
ferent ways. The 'temporal looking' that appears to be a function of the vignette may
not be found in, say, a photograph, where a different type of looking might be engen-
dered. What that looking might entail in relation to a photograph will be explored briefly
in our final example of understandings derived from data, in this case from an aerial
photograph.
Early in the project Priestnall created an aerial photograph of Chat Moss (Figure 12.5),
made up of a mosaic of many individual tiles. As we said earlier, images allow us to see
things through them; through this photograph, with a single glance, we could see the whole
of Chat Moss as if from above. It also enabled us to see Chat Moss more perceptually, as an
entity over which we had a kind of dominion because of our ability to 'take it in', to view
it at one go. The photograph as such gave Chat Moss in its immediate visual totality, but it
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