New map plate post & new content style! (Patreon)

All right, so in trying to keep to my own schedule of catching up with the content, I've met my own deadline of getting a map plate post completed by this Thursday. You can read the full post here: https://www.atlasaltera.com/post/atlasia

If you've already familiarized yourself with my other map plate posts, you will notice a change in graphic content. I have resorted to using more of my own work, plus making graphics using my own photographs or pictures taken off of Wikimedia Commons. Let me explain why I've changed the style.

At first I had the idea of using 18th to early 20th century landscape paintings (Romanticist, Golden Age, Orientalist) because this was the medium that probably covered most of the world prior to photography, and also because I needed a consisted aesthetic in order to convey the ideas I outline below. I decided to use these kind of paintings despite the often colonial or class-patronizing gaze either represented by the artists or found in many of the works themselves. I wanted to control this gaze by showing the same kind of scenes of ordinary people interacting with the land, the best examples of this kind of geographic investigation being from the Netherlands, Friesland, Denmark, and Sweden (see Kenneth Olwig for more on this). In those parts of the world, there was less emphasis on painting the nobility and conspicuous consumption, and instead, painters often depicted life happening on the land. There, landscape paintings painted politics as a kind of everyday action. The cliche scene of the windmills and dyke constructions is, after all, a depiction of a civic nature. This kind of painting is embodies the kind of chorography I'm interested in.

Anyway, my contention was that in other parts of the world, European artists working in the Romanticist or Orientalist medium would have inevitably and accidentally captured some kinds of depictions similar to this, among a plethora of other kinds of representation. There are such paintings of life in China, India, and South America, most famously, even among the most patronizing of the Orientalist painters. Being afforded the luxury of looking back at these works critically, I believed I could circumvent the negative aspects associated with this kind of documentation around the world by showing Europeans in the same light (why, by the way, is an essentialized scene of European peasants working a field Romanticist while a similar scene in Algeria Orientalist?), and try to show peoples' relation to their land in a similar way throughout the world. This, I believed, would turn the problematic gaze into a celebration of humanity, a celebration of places. 

In the end, however, I realized two things: first, most people would not be able to accept this reasoning, at least not point blank without a lengthy discussion; and second, that it was incredibly hard to find free works of art in this style with settings outside of Europe, northern India, southern China, the United States, and parts of Latin America. In short, I knew I could not sustainably keep going with this method.

So, now it's experimentation time with the new look. I hope you like it!