Territories in perspective view. The influence of the photographic distance on the American landscape interpretation

Abstract

Photographic image is now, strengthened by its growing availability, an essential tool for territorial knowledge, analysis and planning. However photography, under its documentary look, does not offer pure information of spatial reality, but a partial, selected and encoded spatial description. The use of pictures, or certain type of pictures, to describe a place is not only an act of filtering information but also a choice of a way of interpreting this place. This paper analyses comparably a set of ways of understanding landscapes, both natural and man made landscapes, developed in the United States in the decades following World War II, and the use they made of certain types of photographic representations, particularly aerial photography, both for the communication of territorial ideas and to distance themselves from intellectually opposed positions.