Geography of the Image: ‘Between Here and There’

Photographs, John Berger observed, are generally understood not to tell a story. Rather, they act to preserve instant appearances. As he observes, conventionally “photographs are used in a very unilinear way – they are used to illustrate an argument, or to demonstrate a thought”. They are often used “tautologically” whereby the image “merely repeats what is being said in words”. And yet, photographs can, in all sorts of ways, serve crucial roles in the telling of a story: in a way moves our imagination and contextualises complex arguments beyond the instantaneous. Indeed, Berger’s own work (with and apart from Mohr) demonstrates that images can also be mobilised in a way that, after the workings of memory, sees them operate “radially, that is to say with an enormous number of associations leading to the same event”. In this way, the photograph becomes a situated means of provoking surprise: an open-ended, connection-making portal onto the narration of a wider social, political, economic, cultural, historic, and/or everyday context. In other words, an object with which to “do” geography.

This photo essay is a reflection on, and engagement with, images that articulate personal encounters with two places, documented by the photographer for two different reasons (one personal, one public). It opens onto a conceptualisation of the interrelation between these two sets of images, the places they represent, and the ways in which our geographies are experienced, made sense of, and imprinted upon (or with). What do they say about the processes that formed, and still form, them? What potential do such images hold - or can they be made to acquire - for knowing these surroundings?