Geographies of landscape: Representation, power and meaning

Abstract

Green criminology has sought to blur the nature-culture binary and this paper seeks to extend recent work by geographers writing on landscape to further our understanding of the shifting contours of the divide. The paper begins by setting out these different approaches, before addressing how dynamics of surveillance and conquest are embedded in landscape photography. It then describes how the ways we visualize the Earth were reconfigured with the emergence of photography in the nineteenth century and how the world itself has been transformed into a target in our global media culture.

The Critical Foundations of Visual Criminology: The State, Crisis, and the Sensory

“…Crucial to the "Apollonian gaze," Cosgrove (2001:xi) explains, is the way it "seizes divine authority for itself, radiating power across the global surface from a sacred center, locating and projecting human authority imperially towards the ends of the earth." These dynamics of surveillance and conquest are embedded in the Western imagination and thought (see also Carrabine, 2018c) and while many geographers have been orientated upwards, even if looking down to the ground, others have sought to understand further the depth of power by looking below the earth's surface. The underground is indelibly tied to danger, risk and the unknown.…”

Earth–world–planet: Rural ecologies of horror and dark green criminology

“…Reading ecology and its cultural representation through dark ecological thought offers a unique and timely opportunity to expand the horizons of green-cultural criminology. Eamonn Carrabine (2018) has recently described the ways in which the visual representation of rural landscapes has historically reflected idyllic notions of rurality while concealing, at times, the political and social dynamics of inequality and power. Thinking spaces like Appalachia in a dark ecological frame similarly requires consideration of the dynamics of the rural idyll: in some sense, dark ecological thought entails reading and knowing the non-idyllic landscape as equally present, valid, and meaningful as its idyllic counterpart.…”

“…More recently, Avi Brisman andNigel South (2013, 2014) have called for the development of a "green cultural criminology", a turn that seeks to orient the curious gaze of cultural criminology toward issues of environmental harm and its cultural dimensions and representation(s). These calls have primarily, so far at least, brought forth some criminological interest in visual depictions of the intersection(s) of culture and environment (see, generally, Carrabine, 2018;McClanahan et al, 2017;Natali and McClanahan, 2017), a tendency that illustrates not only an increased interest in cultural issues within green criminology, but also the simultaneous cross-pollination of visual criminology with green and cultural criminological variants.…”

Reading Pictures: Piranesi and Carceral Landscapes

“…Of course, it cannot convey all the developments and conventions associated with how we come to view land as a landscape, let alone our place in it, but it does point to when and why certain cherished images of 'nature' began to take centre stage. Landscape art, consequently, has been understood as a key site for articulating class relations, a means of forging national identity, a vital mechanism in the exercise of colonial power, and a web of gendered values embedding processes of subjugation (see also Carrabine, 2018c, for further elaboration on these different dynamics).…”