Geography and the visual image

Abstract

This paper forwards a hauntological approach to the study of visual images in human geography, providing a nuanced understanding of what images can do: their power, meanings, and our responses to them. Like ghosts, visual images have an undecidable, ‘in-between’ status, haunting between material and immaterial, real and virtual. Both are theorized as dead and alive, representation and presentation, as deadened, flattened copies of reality or animate, affective, transformative, having a ‘life’ of their own. The hauntological approach haunts persisting textual/ontological divisions, opening up new lines of inquiry.