https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8124-7109
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ABSTRACT
Since its official invention in 1839, photography has been linked to cartography and vice versa, first for aspects of territorial appropriation and control (military and colonial applications), then in the developments of radical and artistic cartography. Today, photography and cartography stand at the intersection of institutional, scientific, amateur and artistic practices, all mediated by technology. While this diversity of viewpoints is a considerable enrichment to contemporary cartographic representations, it also raises questions about the legitimacy of their producers. Do maps and photography, as they are practiced and studied today, blur the space they represent, or is the opposite the case? This article takes a brief – and therefore non-exhaustive – look at the shared history of these two media up to the present day. There are three main topics: technology, history, and artistic and artisanal approaches.
RÉSUMÉ
Dès son invention officielle en 1839, la photographie s'est connectée à la cartographie et inversement, d'abord pour des aspects d'appropriation et de contrôle territorial (applications militaires et coloniales), puis via les développements des cartographies radicale et artistique. Ces deux médiums se situent aujourd'hui à la jonction entre pratiques institutionnelle, scientifique, amateure et artistique, médiatisée par la technique. Si cette diversité des regards enrichit considérablement les représentations cartographiques contemporaines, elle soulève aussi des interrogations quant à la légitimité de leurs producteurs. La carte et la photographie telles que pratiquées et étudiées aujourd'hui floutent elles l'espace qu'elles représentent ou est-ce le contraire ? Cet article propose une lecture rapide - et donc non exhaustive - de l'histoire commune de ces deux médiums jusqu'à aujourd'hui. Trois points balisent le propos : la technique, l'histoire des disciplines et les approches artistiques et artisanales.
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Notes
1 The invention of photography was recorded in 1839 by the Académie des Sciences in France (universal date). According to Frizot (Citation2018), a photograph is ‘a sensitive surface, a surface uniformly prepared with a substance that modifies its properties when it receives light [photons]. This statement applies to all forms of photography, and digital photography is no exception’ (p. 31).
3 Zinc engraving is a series of industrial printing techniques based on the same process as lithography, but on a zinc plate. Photozincogravure is used to transfer a photographic image onto a zinc plate, which is then printed in several copies.
4 The map is engraved ‘upside down’ so that the printed image is ‘right side up’; the same applies to making a positive from a negative in photography. (Vladova, Citation2013).
5 Stereoscopy is a technique for obtaining an impression of relief by means of two images of an object (e.g. Holmes, Citation2008); anaglyph allows stereoscopic examination of a pair of images printed one on top of the other in complementary colours, and separated by means of appropriate colour filters.
6 The keywords used for this research are: photo-interpretation; GIS; photogrammetry; photography; aerial photography; quantitative digital photography.
7 See also Baily and Inkpen (Citation2013), who emphasise the differences, at an identical period, between cartographic documents and photographs: ‘the salt marshes represented on the maps used (…) were significantly different from those mapped using aerial photographs dating from a similar period. While this does not question the use of historical maps along this part of the coast, it suggests that they should be treated with a degree of caution and that their reliability varies’ (p. 503).
8 For the history of aerial archaeology, e.g. the Aerial Archaelogy Research Group website http://a-a-r-g.eu/aerial-archaeology/ and in France https://archeologie.culture.gouv.fr/archeologie-aerienne/fr/inventaire-et-carte-archeologique
9 Bertin (Citation1973/2005) distinguishes the ‘rational’ image – the graphic, e.g. a monosemic system in which ‘each sign precedes the observation of the assembly of signs’ – from the ‘figurative’ image – polysemic or even pansemic, ‘which no longer means anything at all’, e.g. ‘any photograph, or an aerial photograph, is always accompanied by a certain coefficient of ambiguity: who is this figure? what does this black spot, this shape, represent?’. (p. 6).
10 Ethington refers to this as the ‘hyperspatial Internet’, e.g. https://www.hypercities.com/
11 e.g. in France: https://www.ign.fr/reperes/la-cartographie-au-fil-du-temps; in Ireland: https://osi.ie/about/history/osi-pioneers/
12 Scanning is used for voluminous documents (maps and atlases, leaflets, registers, press, certain manuscripts, etc.) https://www.bnf.fr/fr/formats-et-techniques-de-numerisation-en-mode-image /
16 For R. Long, see for example: Dartmoor Riverbeds. A four-day walk along all the riverbeds within a circle on Dartmoor (1978), Low Water Circle Walk (1980) or A hundred mile walk (1971–1972), https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/long-a-hundred-mile-walk-t01720; for D. Oppenheim, see Wishing the Mountains Madness, 1977, https://stormking.org/exhibitions/oppenheim/wmm.html; Landslide, 1973, https://whitney.org/collection/works/42357
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Claire Portal
Portal Claire as a lecturer and researcher at the University of Poitiers, my main areas of interest are landforms, environmental and landscape evolutions, first in the context of protected area and geoheritage and then transposed to the notions of anthropocene and ‘wilderness’. My research involves a methodological approach which mainly pertains to geo-history (landscape trajectories). In these different contexts I have used photography which is at the heart of this publication. This article is the fruit of work carried out as part of the ICAR Project – Incertitudes CARtographiques/ Cartographic Uncertainties (2021–2023), which I coordinate with Christine Plumejeaud-Perreau, Marion Picker and Régis Barraud.