The sense of a place. There are many definitions; some bring us back to ancient civilizations, others to contemporaneity. All refer to the need to understand and define our relationship with places. The sense of belonging is a fundamental need in the human being, while the uprooting of civilization from places, urban homologation, the removal of historical references, and replacement with global standards are just recent achievements.

Athènes, Olympiéion (Sud-Est), Neue Photographische Gesellschaft, 1909, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

The human species identifies with its land for a long time on the planet. Borders were one of the earliest forms of artificial language that separated domestic from what was taboo. And only a few people could move beyond those signs, and limitations. One of the founding assumptions of ancient Greek civilization, on which Western philosophy of thought is built, is precisely the sense of measure. Yet, this no longer seems to be our assumption today. We could easily argue that our species has the means to build and live in a sans frontières society, where it is possible to work, communicate, travel, buy, teach, and much more at any time anywhere in the world. The advancing society proposes a new anthropological model based on flexible and no border capitalism; consequently, we are all migrants in this new perspective.

© Richard Misrach, 'The Wall', 2009

© Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Ma'ale Edummim #1, 2006. Chicago, Tze’elim Military Base, Negev Desert. Everything that happened, happened here first, in rehearsal. The invasion of Beirut, the first and second Intifada, the Gaza withdrawal, the Battle of Falluja; almost every one of Israel's major military tactics in the Middle East over the past three decades was performed in advance here in Chicago, an artificial but realistic Arab town built by the Israeli Defence Force for urban combat training.

© Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Chicago (Untitled) #4, 2006. Chicago, Tze’elim Military Base, Negev Desert.

© Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Chicago (Untitled) #2, 2006. Chicago, Tze’elim Military Base, Negev Desert.

The term "perspective" is essential for grasping the situation. The representation of space has long been two-dimensional. Then around the fifteenth century, in the city of Florence, a sort of medieval New York, something changes. In a bourgeois and wealthy class, which bases its fortune on a rational and objective evaluation of reality, raise the need to express a vision of space perfectly measurable, to give life to a science of the representation of places. They called it perspective and started to export it through paintings and architecture across Europe.

One of the pictorial representations of the concept: Ideal City (late 15th century), painted by an anonymous Florentine. Today it is kept at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

With the Enlightenment, the rational basis of this concept gets stronger. New forms of increasingly realistic representation take shape thanks to the "veduta", the "panorama", the "diorama". Above all, perspective science is no longer just exclusive of drawing and painting. Photography bursts into the scene, replacing the camera obscura used by Canaletto to paint Venetian landscapes with a more mechanical vision. Chemical light instead of the painter's hand. The era of reproducibility begins. The smartphone is only a technical evolution thus of the perspective principle, which some historians consider the engine of modernity and therefore of what we are today.

Antonio Canal, "Canaletto", Canal Grande from Palazzo Balbi to Rialto, Museo Ca' Rezzonico 

The sense of place cannot ignore this deduction. The human species differs from other animal species because it uses tools. Therefore the perception and representation of space in all eras are linked to the instruments we adopt. Like the camera, for example. An interesting aspect is that today the progress of the perspective principle has opened up to a new virtual spatiality, and perhaps to an evolution of the science of representation. Internet, satellite georeferencing, simultaneous street view, instantaneous communication, and extreme accessibility place us from a new observation point. Maybe, as in Giotto's paintings in the thirteenth century that revolutionary anticipated the cultural innovation of the Renaissance.

© Doug Rickard, "New American Pictures" 

We are facing an endless prairie where spatial dimensions explode. This change probably feeds new definitions of the sense of places. It allows you to live in multiple locations and experience numerous reasons for belonging. It is fascinating to explore this issue and do it with any democratic technology and creative freedom. Places become our playground. We can appropriate and dispose of places with ease that no one has ever experienced before. Let's not forget that our grandparents saw in a lifetime the images that we see perhaps in an hour.

This short writing is a trip through these spatial achievements, which are based on cultural and anthropological reforms. Places do not exist per se; they exist when we pronounce, perceive, and then, perhaps, represent them. 

John Constable, "The Cornfield", painted 1826, National Gallery, London (UK)

© Roei Greenberg, Landscape with Oak Trees and A Hunter, from the series "English Encounters", 2019

Finally, we shall not forget that we registered different directions in understanding our relations with places throughout history. Eastern traditional painting represents reality differently than Western art. The composition of the landscapes derives from the Taoist and Buddhist philosophical traditions that teach meditation as a preparation for artistic representation. Create a void within yourself to grasp the beauty of the nature that surrounds us and enter into harmony with it. Space is not represented there according to the Renaissance perspective but as a sum of vertically organized images, where material things are at the base; animals, men, and houses. There is the void in the central part; the main theme of oriental aesthetics, namely the negative space in which clouds, fog, or water are contained. Above is the celestial space that contains the sky, the mountains and the hills. Depth is created by the three vertically superimposed planes.

Zhao Mengfu. Self Portrait. 1299, Album leaf. Palace Museum, Beijing.

Zhao Mengfu, Autumn Colors on the Qiao and Hua Mountains, 1295, (28.4 x 93.2 cm) National Palace Museum, Taipei.

Zhao Mengfu Twin Pines, Level Distance, detail, ca. 1310 (26.8 x 107.5 cm);The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Therefore, if it is true that photographic techniques derive from the science of perspective representation, and that modern instruments respond to that rational principle, nevertheless our sensitivity can respond to very different and personal needs of conscience. Regardless of what we can represent, or the theme we want to develop, or the subjects we intend to capture, there is still the possibility of expressing places through our senses.

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Steve Bisson (website)