ABSTRACT
Geographers spend a lot of time working with images. They do not, however, generally call them ‘images’ – they are called charts, graphs and, even, maps. The term ‘images’ tends to be used in a negative way. The word image is used to imply superficial, not factual, obscuring and covering up reality, conveying a biased impression. There are, it seems, ‘bad’ images that are things out there in the world that get in the way and mislead people (poor dears) and ‘good’ images that allow the geographer to grasp what is really going on. Nor is this confined to geography: Clifford Geertz comments of scientific writing in general ‘that “symbolic” opposes to “real” as fanciful to sober, figurative to literal, obscure to plain, aesthetic to practical, mystical to mundane, and decorative to substantial’ (in Baker 1993: 10). Image is taken to imply the opposite of real, in a series of binary pairs where two terms are opposed and we are trained through years of education to value the second terms on Geertz’s list. Geography has seen many variants on this pattern, some of which are explored in more detail later. Geographers have studied ‘mental maps’ to see how these diverge from ‘reality’, the ‘perception’ of risk as opposed to statistical likelihood, tourist images as glamorizing real places, facades and regenerated areas as images concealing real economic processes or literature as a ‘subjective’ representation of a region. The discipline has often implied that images obscure or deviate from a reality revealed by careful geographical study.
