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Main GroupIn “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands” (1986), Latour calls attention to the “drift”, ubiquitous to debates surrounding perception, from the observation of three-dimensional objects to the inspection of two-dimensional images which have been made less confusing (emphasis in original). The drift in question here is twofold: it is both the transformation of landscape into an aerial photographic object in the production of military maps, and the transmission of this transformed entity into the field of archaeological mapping survey not only in the air, but also upon the ground. It is a transference which aligns closely with the status of photographic images in their relation to spatiality, temporality and the material – concepts hardly unique to archaeology, but nevertheless definitive of it.
Drawing upon the ideas of Peirce, Barthes, and Derrida, this paper explores the path by which the unique semiotics of photographic representation, embedded within military aerial reconnaissance, construct a specific complex perception of landscape. Further, this paper seeks to argue that this perception of landscape as constructed by aerial photography has arguably come, by way of a historical connectedness between institutions, to prefigure archaeological approaches to landscape. I suggest that archaeology has ‘inherited’ an idea of landscape that in part can be traced back to military applications of aerial photography, and that the aerial photographic gaze actually haunts particular terrestrial perceptions of landscape within archaeological research. The consequence of Latour’s drift is the representation’s ability to dominate the perception of the object even when it is returned to in its physical reality – even when, as in the case of landscape, what is physically returned to is, by virtue of that return, no longer an object.
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