Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
boundary.... The photograph shows everything in sharp delineation from
edge to edge, while our vision, because our eyes are foveate, is sharp only at
its 'center.' ” Berger (1977:18) goes further, suggesting “The camera isolated
momentary appearances and in so doing destroyed the idea that images were
timeless.... What you saw depended upon where you were when. What you
saw was relative to your position in time and space. It was no longer possible
to imagine everything converging on the human eye as the vanishing point of
reality.”
Cameras soon found a host of new applications, ranging from family por-
traits to police work. In 1856, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon ascended into the
skies over Paris to view it from above, initiating a process of aerial photogra-
phy that extended to the space age. In freezing the world of fast motion,
photography also expanded vision to include the past. In the 1870s, Eadweard
Muybridge recorded a galloping horse using a series of cameras triggered by
trip wires as it ran by, and in 1882 French physician E. Marey invented
“chronophotography” to study the aerodynamics of
flight in birds and run-
ning bodies. Such images of moving subjects and objects divorced the
temporal and spatial dimensions: “Their e
fl
ect was to shatter the post-
Renaissance idea of the frame as representing a unity of space and time”
(Cresswell 2006:78). By the 1890s, photographic advertisements had become
a staple in newspapers, magazines, and, shortly thereafter, in the nickel-
odeons. In advertising, color photography served to highlight the opulence
and availability of what was displayed. Photography was increasingly used to
identify prisoners, immigrants, and mental patients, delineating “deviance” in
starkly black-and-white terms (Tagg 1988). Photography also formed an
integral part of colonial regimes of administration: to photograph was not
simply to record, but to control. Nineteenth-century innovations widened the
social distance between the technologically initiated and the uninitiated, much
as the Internet does today. Tagg (1988) likens photographs to Foucault's
panopticon, operating at the nexus of knowledge and power to control
subjects by representing them in some ways and not others.
With photography, the popularity of magazines concerned with travel and
exploration rose rapidly. Travelers and explorers could easily record distant
sites with unprecedented accuracy and detail, of
ff
ering a means of remote
visualization. As Ryan (2005:203) puts it, “Like steamships, railways, and
telegraphs, photography seemed to dissolve the distance separating 'there'
from 'here,' bringing new audiences face to face with distant realities.”
Photography allowed the subject to roam wherever the camera went, inviting
the viewer to identify with the camera lens, and thus was critical to the
creation of late modern geographical imaginations. For explorers and anthro-
pologists, the camera of
ff
ered a means of bringing the world into Western
eyes, extending the “world-as-exhibition” (Mitchell 1991) to new heights.
Photography enhanced the power of intellectual and academic theories
drenched in Orientalism to do more than simply mirror the cultural divisions
of the world, but participate in their creation. For example, the middle classes
ff
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