ABSTRACT
In her history of walking, Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit compares writing to path-making, and reading to travelling. ‘To write’, she suggests, ‘is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination … To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as guide’ (Solnit 2001: 72). Clearly, both carving paths and guided travel entail the exercise of eyesight. As they proceed on their way, both the path-breaker and the traveller must watch their step and look where they are going, the former to lay the trail, the latter to keep their footing while monitoring features of the terrain as they are pointed out. But what of the writer and reader? If Solnit’s analogy holds, then writing and reading, too, should be visual practices. The inquiry that follows is prompted in part by my puzzlement concerning the inclination of many visual anthropologists, and indeed students of visual culture more generally, to describe the written text as a non-visual medium, by contrast to the medium of the image.1 For example, in his introduction to visual methods in social research, anthropologist Marcus Banks assures his novice readers that the materials of visual research are images of various kinds that are made to be looked at, and that it is precisely in looking at these images that people engage in visual practices (Banks 2001). Irit Rogoff maintains, apparently to the contrary, that the study of ‘visual culture’ is by no means limited to images, but also encompasses sounds, spatial delineations and much else besides. Yet in the same breath, she equates what is specifically visual in visual culture with the concern with images. To the extent that visual culture studies encompass more than images, they go beyond vision itself (Rogoff 2002: 24).
