Cartographical image and geographical imagery. Places and shapes of maps in our visual cultura.

Abstract

Increasing interest about images and visuallity in contemporary cultures took shape to a perspective called “visual turn”, which basically calls to the attention for a visual re-examination of almost all disciplines[1]. Geography is not an exception: several revisions of the geographical tradition agree with the necessity to highlight the relationship between visuallity and geographical knowledge. On the one hand, those analyses assume that one of the geographer’s tasks has been to developed visual languages to express spatial conceptions and experiences in graphic terms. On the other hand, within that accepted visual tradition in Geography, Cartography has been given a remarkable place: as for geographers as for the general audience, the map is unanimity accepted as one of the most conventional visual device in Geography. This article aims to examine potentialities and limitations of conceiving the map conceived as part of the contemporary visual culture and then sharing methods and theoretical debates with other fields of knowledge that also examine images.