I was very pleased to have been invited by David Seamon to contribute a photographic perspective for the 100th edition of the journal ‘Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology‘.
Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology (EAP) has been the principal English-language home for phenomenology of place for thirty-five years. The just-published 100th issue (Vol. 37 No. 2, Summer/Fall 2026) has a special section marking the fiftieth anniversary of Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness (Pion, 1976).
EAP Editor David Seamon commissioned seven commentaries on the book, by philosophers Jeff Malpas, Bruce Janz, and Ingrid Leman Stefanovic; geographers Jarrod Lynn and Xu Huang; literary scholar Eric Prieto; and one photographer (me), followed by Relph’s own response on AI and placelessness.
My contribution, “Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness at Fifty: A Photographer’s Perspective” (pp. 35–40), proposes that every photograph holds together four actors (photographer, subject, viewer, editor/curator) with time as a fifth participant whose passage alters the image’s place-meaning even when its surface stays unchanged. The essay walks Relph’s seven-fold insider/outsider typology through my own photographs taken between 1972 and 2018, and closes on the ethical discipline the typology asks of the photographer.
EAP is open-access via Kansas State University’s K-Rex archive.
Here is the full EAP Special edition to download
Comments 1
How does Edward Relph’s concept of “place and placelessness” remain relevant in understanding the role of photography and AI in shaping our perception of places today?