Article

Progress in Human Geography

37(3) 386402
Geography and the visual The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0309132512460902
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approach

Elisabeth Roberts
University of Aberdeen, UK

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.

Keywords
ghosts, hauntology, landscape, materiality, non-representational theory, visual image, visual methods

I Introduction personal as well as public, posing the unde-

cidable, in-between status of the image not
Images can make us cry, shock us, change
as a problem but as a potential. It contributes
our mindsets, and haunt our thoughts and
new lines of thought and inquiry to the
dreams. Yet images also surround us at all
already expanding body of geographical work
times, unnoticed, banal and cliched. They
that is engaging with visual methods in light
comprise a large part of the background to
of the performative turn by stressing the co-
our day-to-day lives, informing (knowingly
constitutive registers of visual images.
or not) our actions. Thus, images operate at
The paper begins by examining the uncertain
different and changing affective, representa-
status of geographys images, particularly
tional, material and ideological registers. As
through landscape studies and artworks, after
such, they cannot be studied in a single, pre-
which it introduces the figure of the ghost. It
scriptive and unifying way or analysed dis-
adopts Jacques Derridas (1994) hauntology
cretely from their complex contexts. This
together with W.J.T Mitchells (2005) notion
paper forwards a hauntological approach to
of the image as dead and alive, to posit a haun-
the study of visual images. The purpose is
tological approach which argues one is always
not to introduce a revolutionary new
approach that supersedes all others, but to
re-examine the images existing status in
Corresponding author:
recent geographical work, bringing this to Room 824, MacRobert Building, Kings College, Aberdeen
focus as a constitutive haunting. An approach AB24 5UA, UK.
is formulated that is general and specific, Email: roberts.elisabeth@googlemail.com
Roberts
necessarily haunted, and constitutively so, by
the other. It engages with images as both repre-
sentation and presentation, still and animate,
dead and alive like the ghost.
With the ontological turn and its focus on
material cultures and performance, studying
representations has become less fashionable.
Indeed, non-representational theory suggests
representational studies deaden the liveliness
of the world (Thrift and Dewsbury, 2000), and
asks what more there is. In contrast, Castree and
Macmillan (2004) call for a finessed approach
to representation that need not go beyond it.
Though geographers are researching and disse-
minating through less traditional and more
visual media, little focus is directed towards
the broad category of the image itself: picture,
photograph, advertising, hallucinations, mem-
ories, graffiti. While academic geography has
a history entwined with pictorial representa-
tions, images continue to have an uncertain
dual, even status in the discipline, as both evi-
dentiary and deceptive, as lively and deadening.
Given current concerns in cultural geography
which finds representation to be in tension with
precognition (Della Dora, 2011), as a proble-
matic tackled by performance studies (Kraftl,
2006) and needing the antidote of practice
(Cresswell, 2003), the paper focuses on the
images constitutive haunting of its representa-
tional register by the rupture of non-
signification, but no less so by the signifier, in
the performative, the affective. It examines
what images can do, their power, agency and
meaning, and our responses to them. It sets up
this binary of representation verses non-
representation to highlight their constitutive
haunting, but of course the image is a far more
slippery notion than this.
Images haunt between the visible and invisi-
ble, real and virtual, as material objects and
abstract cognitive, embodied, subjective pro-
cesses. Their seemingly disembodied and spec-
tral nature is one reason they have been thought
of as supernatural, as ghostly phantasmagoria
387
(see Castle, 1988; Pile, 2005; Warner, 2006).
Images, together with ghosts, are never truly
present or absent, bringing what we take as fact
(as real) into doubt and raising questions about
visual evidence and our imagination. In this
paper, I focus on visual images, but I deliber-
ately retain a broad definition of image (over
picture, for example) because it is more pro-
ductive here, encompassing different effects
and registers of visual experience as complex
assemblages of virtual, material and symbolic
elements (W.J.T. Mitchell, 2005b: xiii).
Before beginning to discuss geographys
relationship with visual images, I ought to out-
line the reasons the paper takes this broad direc-
tion. Although I will give some specific
examples, I largely remain theoretical. As such
I hope to avoid a close focus on one type of
visual image (such as photograph) which
might eclipse the differing genres, uses, con-
texts and forms that comprise such images and
forget that all visual media operate and work
on us in slightly different ways. Instead, I dis-
cuss here the haunting which is common
between media, and the hauntology I develop
is applicable to them all (though the results will
be necessarily different because of their differ-
ences). Thus the reader may feel haunted by
noticeable absences such as discussion of film,
cartography, GIS, geopolitical engagement with
news media and videography, all current, perti-
nent ways geographers engage with visual
images. Several methodological reviews have
been published since the ideas in this paper were
first developed, some explicitly hauntological
and others resonating with the themes discussed
here see Mulvey (2005) and Donaldson-
McHugh and Moore (2006) for hauntologies
of film; Bauch (2010) on GIS; Cosgrove
(2008) and Jacob (2006) on maps; Garrett
(2010) and Simpson (2011) on videography;
Hawkins (2010a) and Tolia-Kelly (2012) on
geography and art. I ask the reader to bring their
own specificity and comparisons from these dis-
crete yet overlapping literatures to the general
388
ideas of the paper. I cannot speak directly to all
visual methods; the hauntological approach is,
instead, a general theory of the specific, as
described in more detail throughout.
II Geography and the visual image
Current geographic work relating to visual
images appears as a continuation and critique
of geographys historical engagement with
them. Geography is a visual discipline, work-
ing with the comparative power of vision
(Matless, 2003: 222), and with a past reliant
on visual aids like maps, globes, models, slides
and photographic illustrations. While geo-
graphy has always entailed making and inter-
preting images (Cosgrove, 2008: 15), images
continue to be thought as either reliable or
deceptive. Visual evidence can lend legiti-
macy and weight to a speakers arguments
(Rose, 2003a). There is also a sense that pros-
thetic visual technologies like film and photo-
graphy can help us access events better than
writing or personal observation. Yet visual
power is simultaneously expressed as some-
thing to be wary of, serving historically as the
prime tool of the white, western gaze of aca-
demia. Although geographic representations
retain an official legitimacy and an enhanced
authority (Winchester et al., 2003: 6), this
runs parallel with increased concern about
the power relations, truth-effects and mimetic
capacity of representations: the belief that we
should strive to produce as accurate a reflection
of the world as possible (Duncan and Ley,
1993: 2). Scientific observation and the idea
of visual representations as transparent media
or unproblematic reflection of the world are
questioned (Gregory, 1994: 75, in Crampton,
2001: 236).
As things that are created but appear to be a
natural reflection of reality, visual images can
be manipulated to produce or maintain certain
ideologies and power relations. It follows that
the truth of the image must be sought through
Progress in Human Geography 37(3)
its deceptive surface to the social practices
beyond it (Cosgrove, 2008; Rose, 2007). Yet
Cosgrove (2008: 4) argues that the critical
stance that today frames cultural geographys
relationship with pictorial images has itself
tended to subvert their expressive authority.
The expressive authority of the image to
produce its own meanings, effects and realities
separate from the intentions of an author or
from the viewers interpretation, to constitute
rather than to reflect, distort, mystify and
obscure real material relations is also consid-
ered. This has predominantly been through con-
sidering the images materiality (Della Dora,
2009; Tolia-Kelly, 2004; Vasudevan, 2007).
However, a distinction between the objects,
materiality and biophysical reality of the
world (W.J.T. Mitchell, 1980: 360) remains
upheld, though they are differential and part of
the same continuum.
The images expressive authority might
also be understood in terms of the role of the
imagination: Visions meaning incorporates
imagination: the ability to create images in the
minds eye, which exceed in various ways those
registered on the retina of the physical eye by
light from the external world (Cosgrove,
2008: 8). It is the capacity of imagination to cre-
ate new images that have not previously existed
in the material world of their maker that give
visual images unique emotional power, which
Cosgrove notes has always generated anxiety,
prompting social control of their production and
effects, like censorship (Cosgrove, 2003: 253).
Stephen Daniels (2011: 185) also stresses
images creative agency when he suggests that
the technologies of image-making raise ques-
tions of the location and constitution of the
imagination beyond its traditional place in the
human mind, as pictures within our heads, to a
place out there in the world. It is impossible
to talk about vision without talking about what
we see and vice versa. Daniels refers to the close
relationship between how we understand vision,
visual representations and imaging, and their
Roberts
import to the discipline, when he talks about a
geographical imagination. He argues that
Geographys field of vision across its various
traditions remains to be fully explored as com-
mon ground (p. 182). This paper focuses on the
visual image as a haunting to usefully encom-
pass its various elements imaginings out there
in the world to provide a set of conceptual
ideas, as a starting point rather than a prescrip-
tive toolkit. Before moving on to discuss haunt-
ing and hauntology, I concentrate on two ways
in which visual images have been discussed in
geography explicitly, through landscape and as
artworks, to give a clearer sense of the way the
theoretical ideas introduced so far developed.
The status of the visual image follows a sim-
ilar trajectory in geographical literature across
many media dependent on changing theoretical
developments, outlined next with regards to the-
ories of landscape and art. While rarely thought
about in terms of the image itself, they are
always entangled in discourses of the visual and
the representational. Put crudely, this trajectory
can be conceived as the separating out of art and
science as two different types of representation,
the first more subjective, creative and imagina-
tive and the second more objective, realistic and
reliable (Cosgrove, 2008: 161; Moran, 2006:
673). Landscape, which forms the first half of
the following review, has been interpreted var-
iously as painting and scientific observation,
as cultural or natural and real. This art-science
distinction has also been noted in relation to car-
tographic design. J.B. Harleys deconstruction
of maps was especially influential for work on
geographys visual images, pointing out that
they always involve flattening and abstraction,
reifying and legitimating, producing a particular
perspective (Harley, 1989: 7; Wainwright and
Bryan, 2009: 154, 155), and particularly illus-
trating the capacity of representations to con-
struct new realities through the redrawing of
lines on a map.
The experiential, creative and participatory
aspects of landscape and mapping have been
389
of great interest to geographers too, through
community or collaborative mapping and
landscape-art projects. These offer more demo-
cratic representations, moving power from the
elite to the public, studying process over prod-
uct. The second notable trajectory then is a shift
in attention and significance from the represen-
tational product as a finished, fixed form to the
process and practice through which this is
achieved, where visual image is ongoing, transi-
tory and performative (Cosgrove, 2008: 2). The
geographical literature on artworks will form a
second brief review.
1 Landscape
Like the image, landscapes meaning is multi-
ple, changing over time. It has been interpreted
variously as a region or place, as a collection of
artefacts and as a representation either in
another medium (on canvas, in film) or as a
representation of culture through symbolic
means (Winchester et al., 2003: 18). Land-
scapes usage has varied from tangible, material
forms in geographical areas to the representa-
tion of those forms in various media to the
desired, remembered and somatic spaces of the
imagination and the senses (Cosgrove, 2003:
249). Whether inert to latent to deeply political,
landscape carries a relational hybridity, always
already natural and cultural, as a classic
quasi-object . . . shuttling between fields of
reference (Anderson et al., 2003: 231).
Although this relational status has been viewed
with suspicion, the inability to pin it down is not
necessarily negative for those studying land-
scape, who view its doubleness as a virtue,
as something which is both analytically produc-
tive . . . a cultural term carrying meanings of
depth and surface, solid earth and superficial
scenery, the ontological and the ideological
(Anderson et al., 2003: 230). Archaeologist
Christopher Tilley justifies a more reciprocal
approach, arguing that people and landscape are
in a constant dialectic and process of
390
structuration, with practical activities and dis-
cursive levels of consciousness constituting
each other, neither being amenable to prioritiza-
tion (Tilley, 1994: 23, 2425). Daniels (1989:
218) likewise warned we should beware of
attempts to define landscape, to resolve its
contradictions; rather we should abide in its
duplicity. To advocate its duplicity is to ack-
nowledge its haunting or contamination of one
theoretical determination by others.
A brief review of landscape literature reveals
its historical development is sedimented like the
land itself, and revolves predominantly around a
struggle between sight and site as ways of 272). Yet, while Cosgrove maintained the dis-
defining the term, with sight being linked with
representation, the cultural and symbolic, and
site with nature and material life. Following a
period in the mid-20th century dominated by
what Adams et al. (2001: xv) call scientific
empiricism and positivism whereby abstract,
technological and reductionist knowledge was
elevated over more subjective or artistic
forms, the view that landscape resided within
the minds and eyes of beholders developed
(Cresswell, 2003: 271). This meant attention
shifted from what is seen in the landscape to the
ways in which we see landscape, making vision
the central way of getting at landscape (p. 271).
Understanding landscape as a cultural image, a
pictorial way of representing, structuring or sym-
bolizing surroundings . . . a social and cultural
product, a way of seeing projected onto the land
(Cosgrove, 1984: 1, 269), humanistic geogra-
phers studied landscape iconography, mental
maps, environmental perception, and, emulating
their late nineteenth century and early twentieth
century counterparts, they examined literary
texts, art, photography and film (Adams et al.,
2001: xv). Geographers were, then, engaging
with a variety of images. In response to this and
inspired by Marxist informed theorists like Ray-
mond Williams and John Berger, work emerged
arguing that power relations were embedded in
the landscape and that cultural representations
of landscape powerfully masked, mystified,
Progress in Human Geography 37(3)
erased or aestheticized unequal social relations.
Landscape served to separate and create a rela-
tionship of dominance, a privileged view, and
was ideological. As argued by feminist geogra-
phers, landscapes are also gendered (Berger,
1972; Nash, 1996; Rose, 1993). Landscapes were
neither given nor stable but struggled over by
interested social actors, their naturalness and
realism continually contested (D. Mitchell,
2003: 242). Geographers like Cosgrove and
Daniels maintained a relationship between mate-
rial conditions, representational practices, and
ideological ways of seeing (Cresswell, 2003:
tinction that landscape was a view from outside,
the direction of recent work on landscape (and
landscape art) argues landscape is lived in and
practised.
Iconographic and painterly approaches that
define landscape as a visual thing as an
image (Cresswell, 2003: 275) are critiqued in
a number of ways, not only for their potential
to obscure as well as articulate lived experience
(Tilley, 1994) but for framing and fixing (Cress-
well, 2003; D. Mitchell, 2003) and as part of an
epistemological hegemony (Della Dora, 2011).
Those claiming landscapes ontological import
posit a more relational understanding of land-
scape with a stress on process, movement and
becoming (Morris, 2011: 318). They empha-
size unmediated cognitive and affective ties
to the world over meaning and representation
(Della Dora, 2011: 763). These landscapes are
lived, embodied, practised . . . a continuing
process (Cosgrove, 2003: 258). Landscapes
have thus been theorized as opportunities or
fields for action (Martin and Scherr, 2005), as
lived practice (Cresswell, 2003; D. Mitchell,
2003), as performance (Olwig, 2011; Wylie,
2006a), as relational (Conradson, 2005; Tilley,
1994) and as more-than-visual (Della Dora,
2011; Macpherson, 2008; Morris and Cant,
2006). Landscapes are recognized, in a more
complex way, as lived in and through,
mediated, worked on and altered, replete with
Roberts
cultural meaning and symbolism (Tilley, 1994:
26). Like images, or as images, landscapes do
not merely represent a prior reality, they are
powerful agents in shaping that reality (Cos-
grove, 2003: 257). We see with landscape
(Wylie, 2006a). Landscape as something we
do as well as see (Olwig, 2011) stresses its crea-
tive aspect. This is explored in contemporary
artworks about landscape where artistic practice
is being increasingly employed alongside tradi-
tionally scientific methods to explore and
rearticulate the term. Geographers engagement
with artworks is discussed more broadly next.
2 Artworks
A shift is evident from understandings of visual
art as finished products to processes moving
from more traditional art-objects to geographers
interested in art-places, writing about art-
installation (Hawkins, 2010b), performance art
(Hand, 2005), sculpture (Morris and Cant,
2006), land art (Housefield, 2007), site-
specific installation and sculpture (Matless and
Revill, 1995; Morris, 2011) to examine the ways
art constitutes or says something about place, as
situated practice and as public, urban and com-
munity art-projects where social and therapeutic
dimensions are considered (Chang, 2008;
Dwyer and Davies, 2010; Mackenzie, 2004;
Sharp, 2007). Geographers interest in the
visual arts encompasses photography, film anal-
ysis, landscape painting and alternative modes
of map-making among many others. Experi-
mental collaborations have been sought with
artists concerned with landscape, nature, place
and mapping (see Dwyer and Davies, 2010;
Foster and Lorimer, 2007) and, significantly,
different visual media are used in geographers
own work, to which I will return at the end of the
paper.
For Morris and Cant (2006: 865), we can
trace geographies of art from an initial inter- concern among cultural geographers as pictor-
est in mapping the places in which art was found
and how its production changed over time, to an
391
explicit focus upon issues of meaning, crea-
tivity, and peoples interaction with and under-
standing of art. This development is found in
landscape painting. Crouch and Toogood
(1999: 73) identified that the study of painting
by geographers had hitherto concentrated pri-
marily upon the work of landscape artists, espe-
cially British landscape and Renaissance artists
as social, cultural or ideological products. New
work re-articulated art as spatial practice and
transgressed the orthodox claim of art practice
to be inherently special (Crouch and Toogood,
1999: 73). It moved beyond a simple Panofs-
kian dualistic image-text conception of iconol-
ogy which seeks meaning in the authority of
texts toward an intertextual approach that
lends itself to the duplicitous, interstitial and
unfixable nature of meaning (John, 2001:
196). Furthermore, painting is understood as a
form of geographical knowledge-making
(Crouch and Toogood, 1999: 86) and so its per-
formative aspects are highlighted and the
viewer defined as an active and embodied gen-
erator of knowledge (Morris, 2011: 334): it
negotiates between the visual and the verbal,
the embodied and the disembodied, the material
and the discursive as a dialectical image (John,
2001: 196). Yet this duplicity seems difficult to
take up analytically.
Della Dora critiques recent phenomenology-
informed landscape literatures for having
largely left graphic landscape representations
(such as paintings, photographs, and postcards,
for example) out of the discussion as these
types of visual images generally continue to
be approached by geographers iconographically
as static bidimensional images which are worth
studying for what they represent (rather than as
objects per se) (Della Dora, 2009: 354). She
claims that over the past few years, the gap
between the iconographic and phenomeno-
logical approaches has aroused increasing
ial representations are usually still approached
as visual texts (pp. 338, 339). Della Dora and
392
others, instead, favour an approach which
examines the images own materiality and the
powerful effects this can have beyond its sig-
nifying elements (Edensor, 2005; Rose,
2003b). Yet, looking to the materiality of the
physical object can again pose the risk of attri-
buting too much agency to the image itself in its
attempt to remove it from the viewer.
Likewise, in recent discussions about art-
spaces such as galleries or art-walks the inten-
tion is to highlight a different approach to
viewing art than traditional versions of look-
ing or reading, getting away from signifying
systems or powerful gazes. Representational
interpretations of vision and visual imagery are
critiqued and considered alongside invisible,
non-representational and more-than (exces-
sively) representational elements of visual
experience. Yet, more often than not, these are
deployed in an effort to say something about
non-visual or non-representational aspects of
experience, types of knowledge and notions
of nature and reality (Bartram, 2005; Rycroft,
2005). Vision is de-prioritized as the primary
or only register of art; instead, it is rearticulated
as multisensory (Hetherington, 2003; Mac-
pherson, 2008), embodied (Bissell, 2009)
experience. The notion that art is strictly repre-
sentational is problematized, yet few directly
examine the relationship between representa-
tional and non-representational processes.
So far as geography is engaged with under-
standing landscape, representing, practising and
mapping it, then the visual is central to claims
to geographical knowledge (Rose, 1993: 86),
but alternative ways of understanding our experi-
ence are sought over mediated models. This sec-
tion outlined geographers attempts to move
away from traditional visual and representational
modes of understanding the world, instead
espousing a more encompassing definition of the
processes involved: embodied, performative,
multisensory, emergent experience. Visual
images are material agents. Yet, on the surface
at least, representation is still counterposed to
Progress in Human Geography 37(3)
something else called practice or perfor-
mance rather than as an effect produced
through practices and performances (Driver,
2003: 228). Castree and Macmillan (2004: 470)
acknowledge this, calling for the continued need
to study something called representation or
rather, the cluster of practices this term denotes
. . . its inclusions and excisions, its performativ-
ity and power. The new focus on representa-
tion should finesse our current understandings
beyond the deconstructive, symptomatic and
denaturalizing readings that dominate post-
structural and postcolonial work, without the
need for attempts to go against or beyond it.
I argue we cannot go beyond because these ele-
ments are inseparable, haunting each other,
breaking down this false opposition. Geogra-
phers concern with the gap between signifier
and signified, resulting in questions about
whether representation can ever close on mean-
ing, about how exactly representation touches
reality (Prosser, 2005: 4) are iterations of the
problem of comprehending or creating experi-
ence that is unavailable for capture in structured,
organizing and meaning-giving representations:
ephemeral, ungraspable and haunting us for this
very reason. It is for these reasons that the link
between visual images, specifically, and haunt-
ing are addressed in this paper, with the ghost
proving a productive encounter for disrupting
and revising ways of seeing. In order to develop
this line of thought, ghosts and how they are the-
orized are introduced next.
III Ghosts, hauntology and dead-
and alive-ness
While there is no one singular notion of haunt-
ing, ghosts and spectrality are critical tropes
across a number of disciplines. Spectres of the
past rudely erupt everywhere into Modernitys
linear narratives, cities and technologies.
Ghosts are understood variously as vengeful
figures, as uneasy presences reminding us of
social injustices, or as animating forces
Roberts
intruding into the present. Within geography
this ghostliness inhabits spaces and ruptures
practices within the city (Comaroff, 2007;
Edensor, 2005; Pile, 2005). Ghosts also figure
as voices of the marginalized, subaltern, indi-
genous (Cameron, 2008; Lloyd, 2005; Mad-
dern, 2008), resisting, disrupting or haunting
official commemorative places and dominant
(western) narratives and modes of thought,
making other voices, stories and interpretations
heard, enabling different politics to come into
being (Gordon, 1997; McEwan, 2007: 43).
Haunting is experienced as disorientating,
unsettling, confrontational, chilling, spooky, or
even mundane. It can surprise us, implicating
us bodily, affectively and ethically (Derrida,
1994; Gordon, 1997) and it is performative in the
sense that each haunting (if the ghost is doomed
to incessantly return) is different, iterative, as it
enters into a new and distinctive assemblage
(Holloway and Kneale, 2008: 300). The ghost,
then, makes things happen: it transforms (p.
300). A hauntological position is open to this. It
is one of deliberate indeterminacy, enforced hes-
itancy or uncertainty over presupposed givens
and operations involving visibility and invisibil-
ity that constitute our reality, throwing a condon
sanitaire around that which we claim to be real,
material and truthful (Dixon, 2007: 206). Like
images, ghosts occupy liminal states, transgres-
sing or oscillating between thresholds, clear-cut
categories and binary oppositions, blurring the
distinction between natural and supernatural,
objective or subjective, fact and fiction.
Derridas (1994) hauntology, by which,
along with Freud (1959), much ghost-work is
influenced, critiques traditional scholarship for
its desire to ontologize and rationalize, and its
refusal to deal with anything that exceeds the
realms of objective scientificity (Kaplan,
2008). He argues that scholars are not in a posi-
tion to speak with spectres or let them speak
because they draw sharp distinctions between
the real and unreal, the living and the non-
living, the being and non-being. Haunting
393
brings this either/or logic into question. The
ghost eludes full presence, truth, certainty, and
therefore (perhaps quite obviously) most aca-
demics do not believe in ghosts, or in what Der-
rida (1994: 11) calls a virtual space of
spectrality because scholars believe that look-
ing is sufficient. This space is not immediately
available to their gaze. It is undecidable, trou-
bling, creative, transformative, blurring reassur-
ing oppositions. It asks us to rethink the
there as soon as we open our mouths (p.
176). Hauntology, then, does not replace other
concepts but instead inhabits (or revisits) them,
introducing haunting into the very construction
of a concept (p. 161). Haunting is deconstruc-
tive and deconstruction itself follows a logic
of haunting where terms are contaminated and
mutually constitutive of each other, understood
through the trace, an absent-presence gesturing
to other traces in infinite deferral (Derrida,
1994; Royle, 2000). Yet, while deconstruction
has been critiqued for its textual basis, Derrida
made clear hauntology is concerned with the
ontic (haunting it). As art historian Keith Moxey
(2008: 131) posits, the life of the world,
materially manifest, once exorcised in the name
of readability and rationality, has returned to
haunt us.
The ghost requires thinking about visibility,
presence and viewing positions, requiring a
particular kind of seeing (Pile, 2005: 139).
Bearing in mind the long history that has inter-
twined vision, representation and hauntings, the
visual image is a place where spectral motifs are
a prime concern and a notion of haunting might
provide a productive approach:
When visual culture tells stories, they are ghost
stories . . . The ghost is one place among many
from which to interpellate the networks of vis-
ibility that have constructed, destroyed and
deconstructed the modern visual subject. (Mir-
zoeff, 2002: 239)
Derridas ghost is also proposed in visual terms,
where problems of visibility and invisibility,
394
reality and looking, mirror current thinking
about vision and representation. Derrida asks:
What is a ghost? What is the effectivity or the
presence of a spectre, that is, of what seems
to remain as ineffective, virtual, insubstantial
as a simulacrum? Is there there, between the
thing itself and its simulacrum, an opposition
that holds up? (Derrida, 1994: 10)
This haunting is an assertion that the virtual is
in some sense real (Mirzoeff, 2002: 239) and
we could easily insert the word image where
Derrida wrote ghost. In a reverse manoeuvre,
W.J.T. Mitchell (2005b) asks us to think of
images as undead, comparing them to zombies,
vampires and ghosts, shifting from visual
politics of meaning and power to one where
images are interrogated or invited to speak, as
Derrida invites ghosts to. He asks what do
images want? and thus, what response do they
demand from us, investing the image and
viewer with an ethical relation. By thinking
the image as undead as dead and alive own. Munchs painting is enigmatic precisely
Mitchell refuses to accept visual images as in
stasis, fixed through objectivity, deadened,
as flattened copy or as lively, animate, vital,
worldly, affective, but introduces a third
(hauntological) conceptualization.
Mitchell (2005b) suggests humans create a
second nature composed of images which
does not just reflect our values but creates and
threatens them, meaning images appear to
have a life of their own, as phantasmatic,
immaterial entities that, when incarnated in the
world, seem to possess agency, aura, a mind
of their own (p. 105). Identifying the para-
dox of the image as simultaneous dead- and
alive-ness, it seems only natural Mitchell
would use ghostly vocabulary here, echoing
the projection of fear and desire Freud (1959)
attributes to occult beliefs. He determines the
history of images as one of iconoclasm (a type
of exorcism in the wish to destroy images) and
idolatry (belief in their presence, magical or
divine).
Progress in Human Geography 37(3)
Mitchell gives an animistic analogy suggest-
ing images embody a vernacular vocabulary of
vitality, agency and reproductive powers, and,
like species, are able to mutate and vary in dif-
ferent specimens (media). The purpose of the
metaphor (and the anthropomorphism of asking
what images want) is to deliberately focus on
the wildness and nonsensical obduracy
(Mitchell, 2005b: 2) of the image that has legs.
We might ask whether an image flourishes,
reproduces itself, thrives and circulates, and, if
so, why it persists in having significance, its
obduracy a haunting presence meaning some-
thing to an individual or society. Mitchells
example is the way dinosaurs continue to cap-
ture our imaginations. Another might be the way
Eduard Munchs The Scream (Figures 13) or
the Second World War Keep Calm and Carry
On poster have been reinterpreted and
reworked in popular culture and different con-
texts, their meanings changing beyond original
purpose and use, seemingly taking a life of their
because of its polyvalence, evident from its ini-
tial reception. The painting flourishes and
reproduces itself, the content morphing into an
alien, a stressed office worker, a politician,
often for comic effect. The material object itself
is one of the most valuable paintings in the
world, appreciating in worth and notoriety
every time it is stolen or auctioned. The paint-
ing, perhaps because of its supplementary
nature, lending itself to reinterpretation,
obdures.
What does this mean for a theory equating
image and ghost? Well, hauntologically, where
one term inhabits another constitutively,
Mitchell (2005b: 55) asserts that the birth of
an image cannot be separated from its dead-
ness. Rather than attribute too much life to the
image, he calls them coevolutionary entities,
quasi life-forms (like viruses) that depend on
a host organism (ourselves), and cannot repro-
duce themselves without human participation
(p. 87). The visual image as undead goes
Roberts
Figure 1. The Aliens Scream, by Alan Gursz (reproduced with permission).
Figure 2. Scream cartoon (reproduced with permission).
Figure 3. Scream mask (reproduced with permission).
some way to explain its uncanniness in every-
day language and gestures to its spectral and
corporeal presence. As theorized, the uncanny
overlaps with haunting very closely, and
haunting involves aspects of the uncanny (see
Freud, 1959; Hook, 2005; Royle, 2003). Mitch-
ell asks us to think of images as animated from
stasis; they are pregnant with unfulfilled pos-
sibility conjured or irrupting in different
moments and contexts (Gordon, 1997: 183).
To think of images as only alive and autono-
mous or only dead, inert and powerless is to
ignore this.
Mitchell (2005b: 10) advises we need to
grasp both sides of the paradox of the image:
that it is powerful but also weak; meaningful
but also meaningless. He suggests the ques-
tion of desire is ideally suited for this inquiry
because it builds in at the outset a critical ambi-
guity. This is because asking what pictures want
also raises the question of what it is they lack,
what they do not possess, what cannot be attrib-
uted to them (p. 10). The image is dynamic; it
wants to hold, to arrest, to mummify an image
in stillness and slow time. Once it has achieved
its desire, however, it is driven to move, to
395
speak, to dissolve, to repeat itself (p. 72). This
psychoanalytic inspired reasoning is an effort to
allow images to speak for themselves and delay
interpretation. Mitchells critical ambiguity is
akin to the enforced hesitancy of haunting
described earlier. In Mitchells theorization of
pictures not as sovereign subjects or disembo-
died spirits but as subalterns, as go-betweens
(p. 46), the visual image haunts between arrest
and movement, powerlessness and prolifera-
tion, as inert and transformative.
In a photograph dated 1912 (Figure 4), spiritu-
alist medium Eva C is centre stage with a band of
glowing light between her outstretched hands.
She was repeatedly tested and photographed by
scientist Albert von Schrenk-Notzing to capture
proof of spirit life. With no prior knowledge of
its context, one would be uncertain of what
exactly is happening. The photograph features
in an edited hardback of essays on Spirit Photo-
graphy. The glossy pages have an arty feel, giv-
ing the images inside gravitas. There are more
dramatic, disturbing images in the book of
table-lifting, mediums painfully producing ecto-
plasm from various orifices, and bizarre, exotic-
looking cut-out spirit guides. This image is stuffy
396
Figure 4. Eva C and Schrenk-Notzing (reproduced
with permission from Institut fur Grenzgebeite der
Psychologie and Psychohygiene).
and still, melancholy and genteel in comparison.
The girl is plain and her pose subdued. It is
unique in that the mysterious band of light looks
like electricity, but also because it features the
scientist himself, who is to one side in the fore-
ground, peripheral and slightly blurred. I spent
time sifting through spirit photographs on the
web, in books and in the archive and how I felt
about them and what I wanted from them chan-
ged with each material encounter and context
of looking.
The photograph invites us to look through the
way the mediums face is lowered, and the way
the scientists gaze directs our own. A gendered
way of looking can be read into this scenario as
we adopt the male gaze directed at feminine sub-
missiveness. Our view of Eva Cs demeanour
might alter when we know that she was actually
Progress in Human Geography 37(3)
in a trance-like state that was more conducive for
spirits to enter the material world through her.
Mediums like Eva C were considered objects
of scientific investigation, an apparatus little dif-
ferent to the camera itself (Blum, 2007). Though
scientific evidence (or lack of), the photograph is
theatrical and classically composed, which feeds
into its affective resonance: it has an aesthetically
pleasing quality because of this. The sepia gives
a romantic tinge to the seemingly nave notion of
capturing spirits on film, but such photographs
persist in being curiosities, having an emotive
power of their own. But what does it mean to ask
what the image wants? Mitchell suggests this is
akin to asking what it lacks. Without viewers it
lacks values: it is only meaningful and significant
through its relationship with us and other images.
This ethical relationship requires critical ambigu-
ity and delayed interpretation. We might first
question how an image affects us, how it speaks
to us, examine its expressive authority, before
we fix what it means.
How does it affect me? There is a textural
quality to the print, a sumptuous depth in the
contrasting sepia tones and faded softness of
fabric. The darkness is weighty and moody lit-
erally weighing me down, as though I could sink
into the depth behind the figures. Yet the glow-
ing aura streaked across the centre adds energy.
This starkly contrasting detail captures our
attention and imprints most sharply on the eye,
but our glance is less settled than this and is
simultaneously directed towards the light
through the scientists and then the mediums
gaze, shuttling back and forth in a dynamic
exchange. The image has harnessed movement,
not only in the blurred motion of Eva Cs hands
but in the tautness of the right-hand curtains
pleats and the defined tension of the muscles
in Schrenk-Notzings hand. These details ges-
ture to the images desire to arrest movement
and its drive to move, speak, repeat.
As both dated anomalies and pertinent remin-
ders of the history of ideas relating to mat-
erialism and spiritualism, clearly the image
Roberts
and others like it have legs. Through examin-
ing the differing manifestations of spirit on cam-
era we find that the ghost is nothing without
you (Gordon, 1997: 179), but that they can
speak to us a great deal about the periods during
which these photographs were produced. The
camera provided a powerful medium on which
to project belief, curiosity or pleasure, and the
image mutated accordingly. There was an
increase in popularity of spirit photographs fol-
lowing war when grief was pervasive (Mathe-
son, 2006) and they have endured numerous
resurgences in interest. Most recently, the phe-
nomenon resulted in new exhibitions and shows
like Living TVs Most Haunted (Antix Produc-
tions, 20022010).
This brief hauntological discussion is not
meant to be a comprehensive example of the
approach, but it does begin with the singularity
of the image itself and is attentive, hesitant. We
can frame this photograph through a feminist cri-
tique of the gazes therein, consider the theatrical-
ity and staging of the composition and what each
signifier means (what is that on her head?), and
ask at an ontological level how this photograph
affects us and how it circulates materially. In
reality, it is difficult to do this in isolation as these
approaches slide in and out of each other. It is
presentation and representation. With each view-
ing or haunting the photograph mutates, trans-
forms, performing as part of an assemblage of
signification, material objects, affects, multisen-
sory elements and context.
IV Afterimage: hauntological
implications
Images and visual experience have a history
written through with haunting qualities. Haunt-
ing, as a discourse and as a modern condition, is
likewise bound up in the visible and the repre-
sentational. Through focusing on Derridas con-
stitutive haunting and Mitchells paradoxical or
simultaneous dead- and alive-ness, of fixity and
movement, reproduction and mutability or
397
plurality, a hauntological approach to images
begins to take shape. It stresses that whether
moving or still, the image is never stable, fixed,
or truly arrested, but rather always in between
movement and rest, and always capable of
affecting or being affected (Rio, 2005: 73). The
approach lends a hauntological aspect to exist-
ing frameworks for visual analysis, and attempts
to refine and complicate our estimate of their
power and the way it works (p. 73). A haunto-
logical approach takes into account the capacity
of the image to take us by surprise, to resist
interpretation, to appear to mean nothing (natur-
alized) and deceive us, examining our ability to
invest images with meaning.
So what are the implications for scholars tak-
ing a hauntological approach, writing and
encountering images in this way? I suggest three
central possibilities or hesitancies to take forward
as critical to the hauntological approach to visual
images. They are intrinsically interlinked: the
potentiality of the image; its constitutive haunt-
ing; its dependency. Through these, the paper
contributes a nuanced understanding of images
that speaks back to wider debates about represen-
tation, vision and the geographical imagination,
and explores common ground.
First, it begins with the image, its specificity
and (potential) haunting. The pictorial image
draws a bounding line, capable of fixing and sta-
bilizing, but within it is the potential for move-
ment as images leap and pulsate with life (Rio,
2005: 74). Moments of haunting bring this point
of tension, this potentiality, to the fore, experi-
enced through encounters with material forms.
Potential is expressed through performativity,
obduracy and their capacity to trouble and dis-
rupt. Experiencing the energies, attunements,
arrangements and intensities of differing tex-
ture, temporality, velocity and spatiality, that
act on bodies, are produced through bodies and
transmitted by bodies (Lorimer, 2008: 552) is
said to be out of the grasp of representation or
prior to representational meaning. But represen-
tations have affects and images act on bodies
398
and are produced through them. Everyday
representations such as the way people routinely
represent, even if they rarely pause to consider
the complexities of the act they are engaged in
(Castree and Macmillan, 2004: 476), contribute
to a performative milieu. Visual images are
lively, mediating, creating and transforming
reality. They take their place alongside a series
of other performative practices that conjure the
world into being again and again (Rycroft,
2005: 355). They perform alongside but are per-
formative in themselves, having affective,
synaesthetic and bodily registers. This more
compositional and mutually constitutive under-
standing of representations and performative
practices is one way to consider visual images.
It is sympathetic to the critique that thinking
about pure, blank spaces of social encounter,
seemingly divorced from the overall performa-
tive milieu of such encounter, risks erasing
subject positions associated with existing repre-
sentational conceptions of power, identity and
agency (Tolia-Kelly, 2006: 215, in Lorimer,
2008: 553). Future work would examine how
meaning emerges from relations between, or
assemblages of, representational and non-
representational registers.
Significantly in haunting literatures, disruptive
moments of haunting are possibly opened up;
they are a making visible of what is already there,
giving pause to rethink what we see unquestion-
ably. To transfer this directly to a hauntology of
the image would be to recognize that haunting
is not only in images that have emotional power
or affective agency, but is latent within every
image, residing in what Tolia-Kelly (2012: 136)
calls the visual stuff that always already sur-
rounds people. These have different affects and
resonances. While some graffiti are passed daily
unnoticed on the commute, some populate a
spectral cast when encountered in a derelict
building (Edensor, 2005). The beyond, the in-
between and the duality of re-presentation
medium-mediation, presentation-representation,
object-subject, individual-social, referent-
Progress in Human Geography 37(3)
signifier, material-immaterial is the space for
haunting: ethical and transformative, even polit-
ical. Yusoff (2010: 77) calls this space where
things are made, both materially and semioti-
cally aesthetics, and argues it is part of the prac-
tice of politics and a space that configures the
realm of what is possible in that politics. This
space is the real arena of dramatic confronta-
tion, things come into being, incorporeal, unex-
pected and unpredictable (Rycroft, 2005: 355).
Its potentiality is born out of this constitutive
haunting.
Second, the images constitutive haunting can
be analytically productive. Keith Moxey (2008)
forwards the stance that considering the interior
terms of an image its capacity to affect us, its
aesthetic appeal, its status as presentation
should be a valuable addition giving power and
complexity to current understandings and inter-
pretative agendas in visual studies. In practice,
he finds this relation is examined through a spec-
trum of interpretative positions in which the ico-
nic/material and the representational/heuristic
approaches slide in and out of one another.
Ontological studies tend to favour the material-
ity or presence of the image over its semiotic,
discursive or readable elements, whereas one
necessarily haunts the other as a noticeable
absence: the texts themselves suggest the ideo-
logical supplements that haunt them (p.
133). Perhaps the most famous study of the affec-
tive haunting of the image is Roland Barthes
Camera Lucida (1993) in which he equates being
photographed with becoming spectre and
defines the non-signifying element of the photo-
graph, the punctum, as the cause of his haunting.
In his eulogy to Barthes, Derrida re-articulates
this haunting as co-constitutive. The punctum
haunts the studium (language, representation,
universality) because it lends itself to meto-
nymy, allowing itself to be drawn into a net-
work of substitutions: This singularity that is
nowhere in the field mobilizes everything
everywhere; it pluralizes itself (Derrida,
2007: 286). Visual images, then, operate on
Roberts
different experiential registers where the sig-
nifier becomes an intensity, a trigger point for
movement (OSullivan, 2006: 20).
Finally, the images dependency and the
viewers responsibility create an ethical relation,
because even seeing makes us responsible in all
kinds of ways (Yusoff, 2010: 89). Mitchells
proposed method is pragmatic, localized, het-
erogenous and improvisatory (Mitchell, 2005b:
419) whether this is interpreted as auto-
ethnography, participatory or collaborative proj-
ects, post-phenomenology or any number of
possible responses. He insists scholars should
be responsible and conscious that they are contri-
buting to representations in the form of theory,
and forwards use of visual images themselves
as a mode of theory. This is pertinent as geogra-
phers seek alternative, visual methods for
research and dissemination. Geographers are
responding to the suggestion that we might use
visual methods to unpack visuality (Crang,
2003: 242), with increasing interest in using
photography, film and the visual arts as a method
of research and dissemination. Geographers are
presenting their work in more creative ways to
foster different types of knowledge from those
accessible through traditionally representa-
tional modes like writing, by producing photo-
diaries (Bissell, 2009; Watts, 2008),
photo-essays (Wylie, 2006b) and cartoon strips
(Yusoff, 2007), creating visual narratives
through GIS technologies (Kwan, 2008) and gra-
phic mapping (Barnes, 2007). The academic
journal is perhaps not the most appropriate and/
or desirable format and, while Garrett (2010)
notes the reluctance of journal editors to go
digital, more experimental approaches are
being accommodated by journals online, while
research projects more frequently encompass an
exhibition/visual display element. It seems
important that geographers continue to finesse
(Castree and Macmillan, 2004) understandings
of the visual images being created. Videogra-
phers, for example, are advised to be wary of
treating video material as a representation of [the
399
videographers] experience of reality rather than
as visual facts (Pink, 2007: 112 and 88, in Gar-
rett, 2010: 534). Reflexivity and continued self-
critique is what is demanded by the image.
The hauntological approach responds to the
quasi- or parasitic status of the image the
ghost is nothing without you (Gordon, 1997:
179) with an attentive type of looking, which
questions our assumed truths about images and
habitual modes of looking, haunting between
conceptual motifs, looking for occlusions and
exclusions, traces and gazes, fuzzy borders
and aporia (Kaplan, 2008), elevating the per-
sonal or the subjective. Adopting lessons from
the scholar who is attentive to ghosts, we might
assume a position of hesitancy, undecidability
and conscious ambivalence (W.J.T. Mitchell,
2005b) to the value of images. Establishing
cross-disciplinary links between visual studies
and geography, this paper provides a nuanced
approach to encountering images.
Funding
This research received an AHRC grant (number
128520) entitled Spectral Geographies.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Rob Kitchen, Editor 2 and three
anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback
on earlier drafts. I would like to thank John Wylie,
Sean Carter, Deborah Knight and Agatha Herman for
commenting on drafts and helpful discussion. Lastly,
thanks to Julian Holloway and Kathryn Yusoff for
motivating me to bring my PhD research together
in this format.
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