terra infirma, geography's visual culture - irit rogoff : Concept Reflection

"Geography is at one and the same time a concept, a sign system and an order of knowledge established at the centres of power. By introducing questions of critical epistemology, subjectivity and spectatorship into the arena of geography we shift the interrogation from the center to the margins, to the site at which new multi-dimensional knowledge and identities are constantly in the process of being formed.

What is geography beyond the charting of land masses, climate zones, elevations, bodies of waters, populated terrains, nation states, geological strata and natural resource deposits? Geography is:

• a theory of cognition and a system of classification
• a mode of location
• a site of collective national, cultural, linguistic and topographical histories
• a homogeneous space which becomes an order of knowledge through universal indexical measure of the land.

Geography therefore is a body of knowledge and an order of knowledge which requires the same kind of critical theorization as any other body of knowledge. Geography as an epistemic category is in turn grounded in issues of positionality, in questions of who has the power and authority to name, of who has the power and authority to subsume others into its hegemonic identity."

pages - 20 - 21 Routledge 2000.

spectatorship - not sure its a real word - the act of watching something
epistemology - the study of knowledge - not sure if epistemic is a real word
cognition - acquiring knowledge
homogeneous - similar, comparable
indexical - referring to an index
theorization - theorize - actively forming theories - not sure theorization is a real word
positionality - pretty damn certain again a word has been bastardized to make a new 'word' - in this instance the sentence would still make sense and be grammatically correct if Rogoff had just written the word position.

If we skip over the annoying faults in the text, there are some good points here, that geography isn't just about maps, it is about history, location, and cultural identity. This, I will bear in mind when I am next making landscape photographs. The concept of identity is something key to my current project - that the camera is recording a moment in time when I am gone to dream, not necessarily asleep, but gone, then I must return to it, as I would return to a lover.