Thesis Introduction

A landscape, therefore, can certainly be what geographers or landscape historians so frequently say it is: a discrete area. It may also be something else, something defying photography. It may be a prism, or a pipe dream.

—John Stilgoe

There are stories embedded in even the most ordinary landscapes. Physical evidence reveals some of these stories. Other stories, only fictional narratives, weave their way into real landscapes. Yet these individual cases only gain significance when the designer connects them to larger patterns, examines the new combination, and attempts to interpret its meaning. Small stories can illuminate larger social conditions.

Cartographers use the term “ground truth”: when drawing maps from aerial photographs, map-makers send someone to walk the terrain, to confirm and clarify their analyses of data gathered remotely. The finished map adds together these large- and small-scale observations. A broader kind of ground truth guides my investigation. My work builds awareness of the general, attends to the particular, and connects the two vantage points with interpretation.

In my view, graphic design resembles the fiction writer’s craft. Both trade in large works built from diverse small parts. Both claim the intention to communicate. But the strongest parallel appears in their working methods: the graphic designer, like the writer, gathers material, organizes these unconsolidated masses of information into sensible arrangements, and presents the new whole in a way that engages the intellect and excites emotion. What could happen if the designer also defined his own worlds? Can graphic design become a means for investigation? Can a graphic designer hold fast to his vocabulary – image, color, form, and type – and yet begin to make his own discoveries about the outside world? And how might he express his findings in a compelling, yet forthright way?

I test this vision of graphic design by applying it to landscape history, a field propelled by an attempt at studying the ways in which people use land, how those uses have changed, and how the changes reflect shifts in society – a broad task, certainly, but one which can become as particular as recording the appearance of a single block, or explaining the how wave erosion reshapes an island. Landscape studies requires attention to large and small scale conditions, and equally to interpretation – a perspective analogous to graphic design ways of working.
The aerial photograph occupies a prominent place in my work, as a metaphor and as a means for data-collection, and increasingly as a medium. Aerial survey and reconnaissance images sit in the uncharted territory between intentional recording and automated data gathering. Though usually corrected for lens distortion and the earth’s curvature, they lack meaning until someone interprets them. Now that aerial images have become effortlessly available, society too often forgets that crucial stage of looking and connecting.

Behind a sensitively-interpreted aerial photograph, or any place directly observed, lie stories. Though I usually seek to uncover and present stories in a factual way, I cannot escape my deep-rooted drive to create fictional stories of my own. I hold that individual fictions point toward larger truths. Through fictional construction, a writer fashions a world of essential truths, whose inhabitants assert their own intelligences, and whose settings distill sharp observations about the outside environment. But narrative creates a place for itself in the real world, as well, for communities old and young swathe themselves in their own stories until their identities include as much fiction as documentable fact. Landscapes become places when they gain a sufficient patina of stories, either acquired over time or deliberately applied. The particulars visible on the ground, masked in irregularities and falsehoods, are as necessary to the construction of a broad picture as the unblinking, sweeping views from above.