Sight and Pictures

Abstract

TH OW language affects the perceived structure of reality is a basic question in epistemology. At a more popular level, how medium influences message is the theme of many magazine articles and books. In the discipline of geography, much thought has been given to the power and the limitation of mathematical language in describing and explaining the world. And because the issue of mathematics and quantitative methods is often raised in conjunction with written or spoken language we are also aware of its power and constraints. Curiously the impact of the visual media on the grasp of geographical reality has not received comparable critical attention. Perhaps geographers take the supremacy of the eye for granted. Blindness makes a geographical career virtually impossible, whereas it presents no insurmountable barrier to wisdom. Indeed blindness is an emblem of the seer, the prophet, or the bard. Among the social sciences, economics has no room for field observation and realistic images of the world. Sociology texts may show a few photographs of families and workplaces, but these have an extraneous air-decorations rather than illustrations. Anthropology-particularly the subfield of ethnography-relies on the camera to document and to preserve vanishing cultures, but it is in geography that the visual media have come into their own. College geography texts in the United States swell with pictorial illustrations, more and more of them in color. In the classroom, a geography lecture without slides is as anomalous as an anatomy lecture without bones. The motion picture is increasingly used, and some instructors have tried multimedia presentations that combine slides or film with recorded sound.' In laying greater stress on pictorial presentation, geographers move with the mainstream of modern culture which is heavily visual. Children, we have often been told, are brought up on television: they learn about the world by being there, seeing it directly through the camera's eye rather than imaginatively through the spoken or written word. To teach, we show and tell. As visual techniques develop we may do more showing than telling. Pictures are now used to illustrate the text, but the time may come when the text so atrophies that it seems merely to annotate the pictures. If geographers depend more on the camera than do other social scientists, if in teaching regional and introductory geography we shall make greater and greater use of the visual media, what does such dependency imply for our understanding of the world? Seeing places or pictures of them gives us pleasure that is usually mild, although it can be intense. Have we considered the range and the intensity of visual experience, or pondered the likelihood that while it gives pleasure and knowledge it can also mislead and enthrall? Are we fully aware of the biases and the limitations of the use of visual media?