1. Definitions
The last decades have brought about an inflation of visual materials and the occupying of a central place of the visual in contemporary Western culture. Many theorists claim that “Westerners now interact with the world mainly through how we see it” (Rose, 2012, p. 3) and that seeing has become our main source of knowledge and comprehension of the world (Rose, 2012, p. 3). This has led to the formation of a visual culture; that is, a multitude of ways in which the visual is integrated into social life (Rose, 2012, p. 4).
Images are the result of particular means of understanding and attributing meaning to the world, they are interpretations of the world. Realising this made the term ‘visuality’ become increasingly important in visual culture theory.
Visuality refers “to the ways in which both what is seen and how it is seen are culturally constructed” (Rose, 2012, p. 2), an image never being fully objective and candid.
The ways in which the world is viewed and made to be seen by a certain discipline are called by Gillian Rose (2003) ‘disciplinary visualities’. In geography, there is a great variety of such ways and they are created by the relationships between the geographers, the images and the audience (Rose, 2003, p. 213). For example, a certain choice in the
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The methodology – consisting of photographies taken by participants and semi-structured interviews – allows for the contestation of traditional, urban pictorials which present the city as an “aesthetic product” (Datta, 2012, p. 1727) and focus on “museumified visions of urban spaces” (Crang, 1996, quoted by Datta, 2012). These representations claim objectivity through their distanced, detached gaze, which lacks presence of the observer-photographer. By using visual narratives, participants are engaged in the research process and subjective, embodied views of everyday life in the global city are