Geography and visual research

Drawings, charts, maps and photographs: geography has built over time specific and different modalities to look at and interpret the world.

The author introduces in this book a set of methodologies to investigate the area and the phenomena that occur in it by using the potential of video and still photographs.
On one side is defined how to create detailed images with geographical knowledges, exploring different paths through which researchers and participants in a study can produce photos and videos in an attempt to observe, interpret and describe certain social and spatial dynamics. Other side leads into the geography of the images, analyzing and interpreting existing images with different techniques, produced by other, in order to decode and interpret their vision of the world.

Elisa Bignante is a researcher of political and economic geography, Faculty of Political Science, University of Turin – Dipartimento Interateneo Territorio.
She has taken part into several research programs on local development and decentralized cooperation.
She has carried out several experiences of field-research in Sub-Saharan Africa.