So perhaps some of the exclusions and abstracting premises of cartography should be dragged over to photography to see if any of them fit there too? Hopefully this won’t turn out to be a theory that applies to everything and collapses once it becomes uselessly general.
The abstracting practices I can remember off the top of my head are selection, exclusion (which are one point, really), symbolisation – related to significance or power or importance as judged by the maker, rather than an aspect of geographical reality. Surely there were others.
The selection/exclusion point seems the clearest…
The artist’s act of selection foregrounds the ways in which cartography ‘collapses’ features of reality, highlighting the supremacy or hegemony of the visual.
This was about Fontana’s work highlighting the traditional exclusion of sound from the cartographic representation, and his insistence on the presence of sound forming a counterpoint to the visual hegemony, the dangerous supplement to the soundless original reality (of the cartographic representation). I suppose you are then in a chain of supplements really, as the cartographic representation supplements the world, and then the cartographic artwork supplements the representation. So is the artwork more abstract by virtue of being the result of an additional abstracting process? I suppose it must be, but not sure what that might mean.
The political economy of cartography operates necessarily by exchange value, which is the (often useful) fiction that the map is somehow symbolically equivalent to the mapped subject. To use the map, it is necessary to enter into this fiction, and by using the map, use-value is derived from it. Cartographic use-value is therefore a result of the tripartite exchange between the mapped subject, the map and the readers of the map. It is in that exchange that the selection inherent in the map becomes effective. It is always already present, in that the selection is an inherent part of the map-making process, but it only becomes effective in the tripartite exchange. The ability to use the map realises the selection and thereby generates cartographic surplus-value.
In other words, the selection encodes the ideological components of the map.
All selection, consciously or not, is conditioned by the norms and values of the maker.
Does this then apply wholesale to photography? And would I mean all photography or just certain sorts? I previously categorised cartographic representations on the basis of their being artefacts (usually images, but I suppose I was trying to allow for the ones whose material form is acknowledged as significant – but avoiding the appeal to intentionality…) which, as a class of things, all had the same purpose, to generate cartographic surplus value.
maps are cultural[1] documents or representational[2] systems which are primarily symbolic[3] texts that generate cartographic use-value[4] or were made in order to do so
Can images generated by photographic processes be classed together in a similar way, on a criterion of what they are or do? I suppose photographic images have a clearer genesis potentially, in the camera obscura, and then in the chemical processes that started to be used in the nineteenth century. This seems to be a definition of a class of images based more on how they are made rather than what they do, which doesn’t bode well for a direct parallel with cartographic representations. What would and would not be eligible for inclusion in the class of photographs? The digital development of technology – for cartography, the digitisation of drawing, for photography, what might broadly be called post-production – gives photography a difficulty that it does not give cartography. The medium through which the cartographic representation is made, at least on my definition of cartography, and I would say most other people’s as well, doesn’t disrupt the cartographic nature of the endeavour. So a painted map is fine, a hand-drawn map, a map sewn onto fabric, a map made of code and light in the internet, a creased print-out, a laminated OS sheet. But a photograph can’t switch between media in this way, a stitched photograph, a hand-drawn photograph – but a photograph printed onto fabric, ok, the image itself has not been made by exposing a photo-sensitive surface to light, but by a printing process, but it seems to have much more of a connection to the photograph than a painting does. A photograph made of code and light in the internet – ok, same again, and for the creased print-out.
It seems that the directly comparable way of describing these two classes of imagery would be to redefine cartographic representations to only be something like the direct output of the surveying process, however formalised that process was, in the same way that the photograph is the direct output of the photographic process, and the further the image gets from its creation by photographic means the more it is seen as no longer being a photograph but rather being a reproduction, or a digital image, or a collage.
Is there a more meaningful way of delimiting photographic images to, perhaps, photographs of places, landscapes, cityscapes, seascapes – ruling out photographic images that trace a continuity with other, already established, classes of images, such as portraits? There would still be crossover though – the portrait that shows in its background a house, part of a street, and happens also to be a photograph, also a picture of a year, also a picture of a country, also a picture whose content is around 50% whitish and can therefore be classed as a member of the more fragmented class of images that are 50% whitish.
This is not to collapse classification into an entirely absurd selection of arbitrarily shared characteristics, although it’s an interesting alternative abstracting practice, to insist on a non-conventional classification. The point of the designation of cartographic representation, though, was to consider a body of images that function coherently towards the same end(s), not to point and laugh at classification itself. Many maps could also go into our category of 50% whitish images, and that could potentially get somewhere towards a theme of the way whiteness is used to denote absence (or to denote something else) across a range of image classes, and that might be useful, but it is not a project of tracing what the image class does in social terms.
Critical cartography continues to encounter the objection that without a global conspiracy to encode malign ideology in mapping, it is difficult to account for the presence of the interests of power within maps. “In politicising these processes of choice and compromise, scholars such as Harley, in their search for conspiracy, simplified a complex situation.”[5] The starting point of this study is that the hegemonic quality of traditional cartography is such that it does not require an ‘author’ but is an internalised process that functions in the interests of capitalist modes of production. This is what makes notions of hegemony more useful than any notion of conspiracy that explicitly requires the presence of individual agency which, within cartography, is subsumed within the whole tradition.
There is an interesting parallel, or area of investigation if not really a similarity, across cartography and photography in terms of the individual and their proposed agency. I think a map still has a more general (I’m not pausing on this problem here) acceptance as a purposive image, an image that exists and can be used for a particular purpose, whereas photography strikes me as much more naturalised and accepted, therefore something it’s harder to see as a practice that may be involved with power relations or political processes of choice and selection, or even one that functions in the interests of capitalist production probably by generating representational surplus value. There’s a divergence in the way people interact with these processes of making images of course, in that photographing is becoming more and more widespread in a way that surveying is not – even the rise of counter-mapping doesn’t come close to the billions of photographic images now, uncountably, thought to exist. Although surveying is the most formalised method for generating a cartographic representation I suppose, and the process is done in a different form by making reference to one’s memory and imagination and then generating the map – which makes the dependence on the consciousness of the maker more apparent.
[1] Raymond Williams proposes a definition of “Culture [as] one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language […] the relations between ‘material’ ‘symbolic’ production […] art and learning, or of a general process of human development [… , or] alternative views of [these] activities, relationships and processes.” (1988, pp.87-92)
[2] “A representation was […] a symbol or image, or the process of presenting to the eye or the mind. […] [A]n old meaning of representation – the visual embodiment of something – became specialized to a sense of ‘accurate reproduction’ [which] produced the distinctive category of representational art […] Indeed, its emphasis on accurate reproduction runs counter to the main development of the political sense. But it is now very strongly established and is even (ironically in terms of its history) contrasted with symbolic or symbolizing.” (Ibid., p.269)
[3] “Unlike an icon or index, a symbol, such as the scales that symbolize justice, requires the interpreter to know and understand the conventional code governing its meaning.” (Macey, 2001, p.373)
[4] Discussed and defined more fully later in this chapter.
[5] Black, 2000(b), p.22
Into Ruins 