DWELLLING AN “OLD” LANDSCAPE: PHOTOGRAPHY AS A LANGUAGE IN GEOGRAPHY TEACHING

Abstract

What would be a powerful language in (of) Geography Teaching? What would distinguish it from a utilitarian concept, a technique or a scientific tool which registers a viewed or experienced reality? Such questions became the guidelines to understand photography as a language in the production and sharing of geographies, and as a participant in the constitution of a perspective and a visuality system which reverberates in our understanding of the geographic space. For that matter, this piece of writing initially seeks to acknowledge the evolution of Photography as a product of Technique and Science, its relationship with the production of scientific knowledge (the register) and with the constitution of a visual education which reverberates up to the present. As a way to get over this scenario, Photography is regarded taking into account its power as a language: as a trace of culture, an ontological agent that constitutes individuals and geographic spaces. As a way to articulate the theoretical path outlined based on Photography, an exercise of research and reading (sensitive, but also technical and methodological), systematization and dismantling of images of an “old” landscape (a metaphor of the times of Photography and geographicality, is proposed herein, in order to raise the reflection on the multiple spatial languages, and their possibilities in Geography Teaching.