Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 12.5
Aerial photograph of Chat Moss (Getmapping UK)
also gave a kind of ownership to us the viewers. Thus we can speculate that the relationship
between the aerial photograph and the viewer might be a proprietary one.
In an effort to undercut this proprietary viewing, we carried out a mind experiment
in which we reversed the relationship between viewer and the image by raising the aerial
photograph into the air and flipping it 180 . Rather than being looked down upon, the
landscape now looked down upon us, undercutting the seeming authoritative view that
the aerial photograph appeared to offer. This experience led directly to the decision to
construct a ceiling painting (shown in Figure 12.6) as the visual mode through which the
understandings of Chat Moss would be embodied. One of the primary differences between
a ceiling painting and an easel painting is the relationship between image and viewer. The
standard Renaissance understanding of this relationship is a stable projective one, in which
the image in the painting is projected onto its picture plane; from there it is projected into the
eye of the beholder. Ceiling paintings undercut this by having no one static picture plane; in
addition the observer is encouraged, by the composition of the work, to take up a variety of
viewpoints, in the process creating viewing conditions which have a greater correspondence
with the way in which we naturally engage with the world around us.
There are a number of research implications of this, including speculation on how an
image can be made to create different types of perceptual engagements between it and the
viewers.
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