Picturing territories

In this text I will try to establish a correlation between territory and image attempting to demonstrate that a scopic visual regime, one that has been turned and overturned by recent (and not so recent) critical thinking in visual culture, also determines the ways in which territory, and landscape, are perceived and their definitions constructed. For this purpose, I will attempt to delineate a path of connection between some categories which are not simply related by means of a semantics of aesthetics, but, as I hope to clarify, are instrinsically bound to shaping the ways in which we relate to (and place ourselves ‘within’) the very idea of territory.

SOPHIA JOURNAL, 2018

Introduction Pedro Leão Neto This 3rd number of Sophia1 from the series Crossing Borders, Shifting Boundaries, with the theme “Image, Body and Territory”, has as invited Editor Iñaki Bergera, who is an invaluable author and collaborator of the editorial project scopio Editions since its first years of existence. This publication has three major peer-reviewed essays, where its authors challenge our understanding on issues related with the theme “Image, Body and Territory” and where photography practice and discipline is always significantly present. Introducing the notion of a vernacular of economic growth, Kallen McNamara borrows the eyes of Gavin Brown in order to uncover aspects of our daily urban environment that are culturally out of focus, but may be more expressive of our contemporary world than we might like to admit. Her essay is a significant exploration of how a subjective gaze of a particular author, in this case Gavin Brown, is used to critically read in a meaningful manner various aspects of the most conventional and banal aspects of the contemporary urban reality of the city of Houstan. Kallen also makes an interesting creative link between Gavin Brown´s contemporary gaze and the New Topographics landscape aesthetics, which had a significant effect on photography universe, not only in the United States, but in Europe and, as Kallen bring to light, is an aesthetics still influencing contemporary photographers, as happens in the case of Gavin Brown. (read more at https://www.sophiajournal.net/) Editorial Bodies and territory: visual footprints of our inhabited built world Iñaki Bergera In recent times, the complexity —and rich potentialities— of our contemporary world is being fruitfully described and depicted by photographers and visual artists. The interest of urban landscape at large, understood as the natural scenario of our contemporaneity, expands its borders and boundaries towards a more intricate appraisal of the territory and our physical (body) and conceptual (inhabitant) relationship with it. As the following papers explore, it is not just a matter of arranging a visual report —from a documentary perspective— of the space we live in but, rather, interpret and suggest the threats and opportunities that our personal dialog with the territory implies. As every negotiation, this conversation implies mediation, a pulse between a desired natural balance and the dramatic and unconscious footprints of our human action. Our presence —passive or active, spiritual and fleshly— is no more innocuous. By being at and dwelling the territory, the place gains the constrictions of an often contradictory conciliation. It is there where a thrilling visual narrative emerges, where the accurate and sensible eye of the visual artist finds a highly potential field of exploration and complaint. (read more at https://www.sophiajournal.net/)

photographies, 2020

This paper proposes a reading of the cultural and social aspects associated with sundry notions of territory through Spanish photography at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. An analysis of a series of case studies reveals a new awareness of the common space through the concept of trace, being understood beyond the material imprint, as it falls under the influence of the cultural aspects that clarify the account of the conflict and consciousness of the suburbs and peripheries. Contemporary ruins arising from unbridled urban growth, or the invisible wounds associated with certain places, converge in a series of images that have their own tradition in the conceptual experiments of the 70s and the aesthetics of the “non-site” displayed in the 90s. As background, the economic and political avatars of recent years in Spain – also linked to a global crisis – are manifested in a series of photographic musings whose images portray the scenarios of a prem...

2021

Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature, 2013

This is the first part of chapter 3 of Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013). It explores cinema's contribution to the territorialization of nation-states, with a focus here on the Hollywood Western, Alexander Dovzhenko's 'Earth,' and Pare Lorentz's 1930s documentaries. The remainder of the chapter examines alternative territorializations, "existential landscapes," post-Westerns, "kinetic landscapes," the eco-sublime, and much else.

2013

The study considers how place is historically manifested by the invention of photography. This will be to investigate where photography has developed uses influencing the allocation and administration of places, in particular the early architectural and topographical photography in the history of Paris in the Second and Third Empires of France. The study also examines the affects of the photographic image as an appearance removed from a certainty of the world, yet consisting of an excess of information about the world beyond immediate human perception. Consequently the apparatus of photography is a process of mechanical production and its products assume a power beyond their physical presence. The study will show how photography introduces a modern ‘theological’ concept into ways of seeing by the light sensitive imprint amounting to a new image of visualisation. The thesis supports the claim that the history of urban space is specifically defined by the subject of photography in its...

Even the landscape has a birth, growth and death. What seems immutable, for the long-term history, it becomes changeable, sometimes tenuous. So it happens that a landscape does not leave behind any sign; of some other landscape we have memories of contemporary observers; in others we find only traces that remain in the territory. It happens that these descriptive memories of the past or those few comparisons become even ideological and political tools that people use to justify, to support, to prevent a given evolution of the landscape that is in their contemporary. Here then that the imaginary becomes a cultural and political tool that is confronted with the reality; that sometimes he tries to oppose the reality of a territory. It is the summary of the history of the European vision of the landscape and the territory between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries. Anche un paesaggio ha una nascita, una crescita ed una morte. Ciò che sembra immutabile, per la storia di lungo periodo, diventa mutevole, a volte labile. Così capita che un paesaggio non lasci dietro di sé alcun segno; di qualche altro paesaggio abbiamo memorie di osservatori dell'epoca; di altri ancora riscontriamo solo delle tracce che permangono nel territorio. E accade che quei ricordi descrittivi del passato o quei pochi riscontri divengano perfino strumenti ideologici e politici che gli uomini utilizzano per giustificare, per sostenere, per impedire una data evoluzione del paesaggio che è a loro contemporaneo. Ecco allora che l'immaginario diventa uno strumento culturale e politico che si confronta con la realtà; che a volte tenta di opporsi alla realtà di un territorio. è la sintesi della storia della visione europea del paesaggio e del territorio fra XIV e XX secolo.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2005

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Criticism A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, 2015