ABSTRACT

Art and geography share a common route in the search for knowledge through the medium of vision. Geography’s visual tradition may be traced from the impulse within Enlightenment geographies to give visibility to new worlds, of looking that are central to contemporary geography’s descriptive practice. A light from outside the study beckons to the geographer as he makes his measurements and inscriptions. This interference suggests an excessive presence that eludes capture by the lines plotted inside. Vermeer’s moment of illumination admits to the profound clarity of vision, while simultaneously affirming the epistemological value of visual endeavour as a means to reach the outside world. Aesthetics can be understood narrowly as the appreciation of beauty in art, or more broadly as the entire field of sensuous perception, or as a peculiar composite that blends art, affect and culture to arrive at a particular imagining of the world.