Picturing Thickness: The Creative Process of Imaging Sequencing

Abstract

This visual essay is structured as a sequence of imagetexts, which through the bringing together of images and words opens up insights into the Danish landscape Farum Midtpunkt. This we argue, pushes imaging towards new conceptions as a research method embedded in the specificity of place and its change over time. Strung together, the sequence of imagetexts create a thick description bringing together past and present intentions, impressions and reflections in and on the site through a gathering and rendering – or (re)presenting – of Farum’s landscape. This approach is inspired by the picturing of duration, visual-descriptive walks, and projective imagery as a contributor to emergent realities. We thus work towards establishing the imagetext sequence as a methodology of picturing thickness which bridges historical and experiential perceptions providing a new approach to fieldwork in landscape architectural research and practice.

Keywords:

• thick description
• photography
• imagetext
• landscape
• duration
• sequence

Notes

1 The concept of Thick Description was originally created by British metaphysical philosopher Gilbert Ryle in the twentieth century, and later adopted by Clifford Geertz in anthropology in 1973.

2 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Book Publishers, 1973), 16.

3 Isaac Ariail Reed, “Maximal Interpretation in Clifford Geertz and the Strong Program in Cultural Sociology: Towards a New Epistemology,” in Interpreting Clifford Geertz, Cultural Investigations in the Social Sciences, ed. Jeffrey Alexander, Philip Smith and Matthew Norton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 67.

4 James Corner describes how many aspects of landscapes fall to the wayside of text descriptions, yet are essential to landscape understandings. Thus, we adopt the photographic work process combined with text as recovering and returning the visual to our understandings of landscape, giving importance to the actual physical, material and experiential landscape as well as eidetic operations. See “Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes”, Recovering Landscape. Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 160.

5 Corner, “Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes”, 5.

6 Ibid, 153.

7 Joanna Zylinska, “The Creative Power of Nonhuman Photography,” in Photographic Powers, ed. Mika Elo and Marko Karo (Helsinki: Alto University, 2015): 147.

8 Zylinska, “The Creative Power of Nonhuman Photography,” 147.

9 Ibid., 146, 147.

10 Richard Long, a line made by walking like the “All Ireland Walk,” in From Time to Time, limited edition, ed. Richard Long (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz Verlag, 1997).

11 Ibid., 198.

12 Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973, 5.

13 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

14 Christine Wiesenthal, Brad Bucknell and WJT Mitchell, “Essays into the Image Text: Interview With W.J.T. Mitchell”, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 33, no. 2 (June 2000): 1–23.

15 Corner, “Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes”, 160.

16 Ibid., 167.

17 John Berger, Another Way of Telling (New York: A Division of Random House, Inc., 1982): 89.

18 Corner, “Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes”, 162.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kristen Van Haeren

Kristen Van Haeren is a PhD fellow at the University of Copenhagen within the Landscape Architecture and Planning department. She is a member of the research project entitled ‘Reconfiguring Welfare Landscapes,’ which investigates the future of the green open spaces of the postwar Danish social housing estates. The project is funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research. Kristen’s research aims to investigate ideas and perceptions of ’green’ through modes of thick description and photography as a means of discovering alternative ways of reading and understanding the plurality and depth of landscapes. Kristen is educated as an architect and has practiced in offices in both Canada and Europe.

Rikke Munck Petersen

Rikke Munck Petersen is an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen within the Landscape Architecture and Planning department. Her research bridges design and the humanities, and her interests include media mediation; and an ecological and transient, spatial approach to large-scale landscape transformations: cultural heritage, ecology, esthetics and ethics, spatial theory, media theory and design theory. Rikke leads the BSc and MSc design courses reflecting her research areas: Practice and Esthetics in Landscape Architecture Studio and Landscape Film Studio. Over the past four years she has pioneered the use of film, and drone filming, as an affective mediator in landscape design and planning.