ABSTRACT
Introduction Geographers spend a lot of time making representations of reality. They do so using both words and images – be they pictures, charts, graphs or even maps. Representing is a profoundly geographical act – it is making presenting something from elsewhere to an audience. It is also something that has been regarded with philosophical suspicion for centuries. The classical philosopher Plato, for instance, provided a critique in his analogy of the cave – where a group of prisoners were chained for all their lives facing the wall of a dark cave with a great fire behind them and all they could see were the shadows cast on it as people passed in front of the fire. For these prisoners, the shadows or representations become the real world, and they mistook representation for reality. If they were brought out into the sunlight they would be baffled by the colours – taking them as ‘unreal’. Philosophers have gone on to argue then that we are all precisely confined to a ‘prison chamber’ of representation – be it images or language. Representation is then often seen as obscuring or failing to capture the reality of the world. Representation is thus often seen as a problem.
