Place and Image. The Role of Representation in the Aesthetic Experience of Place

In my paper, I will discuss the role of the image in the determination of people’s approaches and attitudes towards places. After a short introduction (§1), in the first part of the essay I will discuss the main points of criticism against the image in relation to the issue of environmental appreciation. In doing so, I will relate Allen Carlson’s criticism towards the so-called ‘landscape cult’ in environmental aesthetics (§2) to the post-structuralist critique of the concept of landscape that has been carried out in the field of human geography (§3). In the fourth section, I will emphasize the structuring and performative character of representations, and will show how, in the present, the image remains one of the fundamental ways of regulat-ing relations between subjects of experience and places (§4). The task of a theory of place-im-age, informed by knowledge acquired in the fields of visual and media studies, is to learn to read images as tools for understanding and defining the environment around us