Place and Image. The Role of Representation in the Aesthetic Experience of Places

Abstract

In my paper, I will discuss the role of the image in the determination of people’s approaches and attitudes towards places. After a short introduction (§1), in the first part of the essay I will discuss the main points of criticism against the image in relation to the issue of environmental appreciation. In doing so, I will relate Allen Carlson’s criticism towards the so-called ‘landscape cult’ in environmental aesthetics (§2) to the post-structuralist critique of the concept of landscape that has been carried out in the field of human geography (§3). In the fourth section, I will emphasize the structuring and performative character of representations, and will show how, in the present, the image remains one of the fundamental ways of regulating relations between subjects of experience and places (§4). The task of a theory of place-image, informed by knowledge acquired in the fields of visual and media studies, is to learn to read images as tools for understanding and defining the environment around us.