berger brought up to date.

Something that informs my reading of  my world.  I saw the "Ways of Seeing" series decades ago - in New Delhi  . They changed my way  of seeing and thinking. About Art certainly. About Culture  and its constructs , definitely .  I see Photography as a Mapping. The rectangular photographs  are the  grid that photography creates. A grid that imprisons thinking within a set frame.

This post might help you understand my post on  Canberra.

This is a also a great way of updating your readings of  Berger.

Just as Berger translated the power-dynamics of art and culture, we are interested in the way that walking and mapping can reveal the hidden (and not-so-hidden) power-dynamics of the built environment: the dominance of imposing structures and the hidden stories of the city that can be overlooked, but not entirely forgotten. By looking more closely at the backdrop that sets the context for our lives, what new possibilities emerge?

It is when we engage with the city, by walking off the usual track and occupying spaces in unusual ways that the power-dynamics are revealed. Occupy’s forest of tents beside St Paul’s Cathedral raised important questions about the concentration of private land in the quasi state-within-a-state of the City of London. The impact of the creeping privatisation of what once was public, or at least free to access, is vividly described in Anna Minton’s Ground Control, and was exposed afresh by Occupy’s struggle to find public land. ‘Anarchitects’ the Space Hijackers creatively question what the privatisation of public space means for civil liberties and our freedom to shape our own stories, free from the constraint of the private interests of large corporations by making guerilla forays into the private realm with parties, cricket matches and spoof planning applications.

By co-creating new maps, we create a new commons of potential, revealing unused spaces that can be inhabited by communities like the innovative food from the skies project in North London, or the community allotments on the abandoned Heygate Estate. Perhaps, just as Berger proposed a politicized and shifting way of seeing, we need new dynamic ways of mapping our physical surroundings that more closely reflect the myriad of possibilities latent in every structure and surface: a new craft of the politics and potential of space.

This practice of mapping also draws on Barbara Bender’s notion of landscape as palimpsest:

In the context of a contemporary obsession with preserving and commodifying the past, it becomes particularly urgent that we take the measure of landscape, both theoretically and in practice. More often than not, those involved in the conservation, preservation and mummification of landscape create normative landscapes, as though there was only one way of telling or experiencing. They attempt to ‘freeze’ the landscape as a palimpsest of past activity. But, of course, the very act of freezing is itself a way of reappropriating the land. (2)

http://www.redrawingthemaps.org.uk/blog/