Before mid-morning the summer morning is still pleasant. And with almost no breeze, it is suitable for flying a hobby drone with camera to see what the world looks like* from 75 to 100 feet up, a bird’s perspective on the human terrain and natural habitat, too. The idea of cultural landscape is well developed in the social sciences but also in the humanities, blanketed with stories, lessons, memories and aspirations, as many places of meaning can be. This photo from downtown Grand Rapids includes several prominent features contributing to the cultural landscape known to many people in the area, but which may be less well known to visitors here.
Here are some of the notable meanings visible in this moment above the city park, Ah-Nab-Awen, with its three life-sized ceremonial and burial mounds rebuilt approximately in the original location at the bank of the Grand River after many years absence from Euro-American incomers of the middle 1800s and after.
- Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum and burial, 2. High rise in blue glass of residential and office space to shape the city skyline, 3. Bridge at Sixth Street from a time when cars were smaller and foot traffic was more common, 4. Bridges for I-196 to allow through traffic to fly along the interstate road with no city disruption, 5. Main post office downtown on Michigan Street and the Medical Mile of health care sites stretching east out of the river valley, 6. Devos conference center and performance hall, 7. Gillette Bridge for pedestrians today but originally carrying city tram traffic into the downtown, 8. Low-head dam from the 1920s (nothing like the Grand Rapids city namesake rock shelves creating impassable rapids), 9. Outdoor performance stage and exhibition open space for seasonal events, 10. Earth sculptures in facsimile to the original ones by Native Indians.
Taken all together this section of the city center is a cultural landscape with a variety of human-made cityscape. The river itself has been shaped, too: cementing the riverbanks or heaping rock there to resist the eroding power of swiftly moving water. So, the river is an honorary sort of human artifact; still wild and home to plants and animals with little care from people, but also capable of carrying names, events, symbolism, and stories — written or spoken, poetic or prose, memories or something less specific associated with the moving waters. This list of identifiers and descriptions is limited to the level of general knowledge or shared significance; things that most local people will agree on.
In addition to the general meanings from members of the society, language and cultural traditions, there will be neighborhood histories and meanings, as well as family or household-scale of meanings remembered; not to forget personal or interpersonal (1 on 1) meanings fitting into the frame of the aerial photograph. Going the other way, not from general to personal, but instead from general city-level to larger frames, the Presidential museum and burial site touches on national and international moments in this person’s life and family situation. Probably there are also elements in the photo that pertain mainly to the state of Michigan or the larger West Michigan region of three or four adjacent counties, rather that primarily being of municipal-scale of meaning.
The scholar Pierre Nora wrote about “Memory Places” in the 1990s, focusing particularly on France. But the idea of memories on different scale all overlapping in certain points can be seen in many places, including in the photo location, above. What this means to local residents is that it is worth remembering the value of Local Knowledge (see the 1983 Clifford Geertz book by this name), since the memorable and significant places commonly known by residents will be invisible, unremarkable, or otherwise camouflaged by ignorance in the eyes of outsiders. The other way to say that is illustrated by your predicament when in a strange place or somewhere for the first time: do remember that the places surrounding you form a cultural landscape, even though it means nothing to you, yet. So, treat the places you visit with care, or at least with respect.
_____________________________*shades of the famous Garry Winogrand reply to the question about why he takes street photos, “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.”
