Space and Culture

This article inquires into the specificity of the local impact of global visual language. It focuses on the contemporary visual landscape of Warsaw and discusses the consequences of the palpable presence of the English language on the surface of the city. Through a close reading of brand names in their contexts, two questions are probed: How does the historical and symbolic meaning of place change through the presence and form of these logos? What is the effect of their linguistically foreign idiom on the local language?

This article presents a chronogeographic account of the Antarctic spatialities that are inflected through the image of the RADARSAT map. Focusing on time as a spatializing operation within the visual geography of globalizing and globally available cartographies, the author questions the multiple geographies that must be considered in a geopolitical account of such a mapping. The subject of this topology is the “event” of the NASA RADARSAT map of Antarctica exhibiting the effects of global warming as a scientific and media event on the Web. Specifically the RADARSAT map documents destruction and also renders it innocuous through technologies of distance. This realization of geopolitical imperatives through scientific visualization reveals particular tensions and operations within Antarctic and global visual cultures. As a narrative cartography, it exhibits how geographic information systems operate in a plurality of visual regimes. The author concludes that the politics of visualizing Antarctica is embedded in the histories of its media production and in this reveals how time has a chronogeographic operation.

This essay explores the critical role of motels as markers of transition between idiosyncratic locales and homogenized chains. Toward that end, the essay expands on a newly proposed concept of omnitopia—an intersection of architectural design and human practice through which distinct places become nodes of a perpetual continuum—by focusing on the construction of “place” in roadside motels. From the analysis of omnitopia found in early-20th-century motels, three practices emerge: dislocation through vernacular architecture, fragmentation through iconic signage, and mutability through roadside simulacra.

Ideas of embodiment and performance have been crucial in destabilizing the visual hegemony of images, cameras, and gazes in tourist studies. This article discusses how a practice-inspired performance perspective potentially allows a more satisfying account of tourist photography’s “nature” than conventional “representational” ones in which tourist photography is dismissed as “all eyes and no bodies and sometimes no brain.” The author writes a new account, seeing tourist photography as performed rather than preformed and tourist photographers as framing as much as being framed. Tourist photography is a choreographed and experimental performance connecting the representational and nonrepresentational. Tourist photography is made less visual and more embodied, less concerned with “consuming” places than with producing social relationships, such as family life. The author examines the performances and performativities, the embodied practices and textual and corporeal choreographies, of tourist photography within a family photography context, the “family gaze.” The article draws on ethnographic research of tourist photographic performances at northern Europe’s largest medieval ruined castle, Hammershus.

This article begins with a photograph of the Children’s Memorial Hospital in Montreal depicting the induction of a pneumothorax, a treatment for tuberculosis (TB) used from the 1920s to the 1940s. The authors place the photograph in historical context and review the contents of the room it shows, including a patient’s chest X ray. Building on Martha Langford’s Suspended Conversations, the authors examine the use of such photographic and X ray images in depictions of TB care in the mid-20th century. The authors parallel the spaces shown explicitly (the treatment facility) with those shown implicitly (the chest cavity) and then juxtapose these historical images with those of medical thoracoscopy, a current technique for visualizing chest disease that likewise begins with pneumothorax. Finally, the authors consider the changing audience for these images by highlighting the evolving role of the patient as actor and consumer rather than as passive recipient of health care expertise.

This article explores the way that the themes of cultural memory and commemoration are embodied by the photographs of New Zealand artist Natalie Robertson. Robertson photographs the official, mass-produced road signs that exist throughout the New Zealand landscape. Because she conducts her photographic activity at night, the signs come to appear as luminous effigies of the past, whereby the names adorning their surfaces appear as strange and at times uncanny reminders to passersby of the land’s original ownership and affiliations. This nocturnal focus enables Robertson to show that despite pointing to actual roadways (which tend for the most part to be subsumed within our everyday mode of consciousness), the signs she represents also work to acknowledge and commemorate a history that remains obscured by mainstream conceptions, understandings, and experiences of place.

This article uses photography and ethnography to understand and represent residents’ emotional-phenomenological experiences of walks through their neighborhood. It addresses how narratives of the personal and the social structure individuals’ experiences of familiar public spaces. A diverse group of residents gave the author their personal tours of emotionally significant neighborhood places. The author then continued these conversations with participants using photographs of these ordinary sites. The article addresses how these personal stories layer on public spaces and build aspects of psychologist Kurt Lewin’s situational, emotional and individual-specific life space, as well as constructing senses of dwelling and Heideggerian lifeworld. To consider ways in which people build senses of home in public spaces, the article looks at ordinary things to which people give little reflective attention yet that often support deep connections to place.

In Islamic societies, the segregation of gender typically leads to the courtyard house, with its characteristic feature of enclosure. However, there are other types of housing in the Middle East. By looking at tower houses in the Yemenite city of Sana’a, the author questions the validity of the widely used model of interpretation of the separation of urban space into the opposition between public and private space. The evaluation of architecture with respect to various studies of the gender relationship in traditional urban Yemeni society leads to a much more complex and dynamic picture of living and the replacement of privacy by a second form of public space used exclusively by women.