ABSTRACT
This chapter blends personal and academic essay writing. It discusses how the author trained herself to think about landscape photography in media studies terms while working as a poet and how these experiences co-inform her approach to geopoetic methods. The version of geopoetics argued for here casts landscapes, including industrial landscapes, as capacious but shaped by chance and the idea of chance, by complex ecological and social systems, and by the capacities and limits of the humans that interact with them. For the author, this approach to geopoetics is linked structurally to the insights of disability studies. This chapter further challenges geopoetic practitioners to attend to collisions between locative, non-dominant media philosophies on the one hand and politics of form on the other. It acknowledges observation as a dynamic epistemic category valued by both poets and geographers. In addition, in this chapter wide-angle photographic lenses serve as a metaphor for the valuable but risky wide-angle engagements that interdisciplinary study permits. Excerpts from an academic study of David T. Hanson’s aerial photographs of Superfund sites support the argument that carefully deployed abstractions facilitate new points of contact between embodied experience and the world at large.
