Cartography

The map as art — from Ptolemy to the pixel Overview A map is not a photograph. It is not a window onto the world. It is a drawing — a highly conventionalised, painstakingly constructed drawing made by a human hand (or, lately, by an algorithm trained on human choices), and like all drawings it carries within it the aesthetic preferences, the technical limitations, the ideological commitments, and the imaginative horizons of its maker. The history of Himalayan cartography is, among other things, a history of art: of visual conventions invented, refined, standardised, exported, and eventually digitised. The contour line is a graphic invention as significant as linear perspective. Hill-shading is a form of chiaroscuro. The choice of colour on a topographic map is as deliberate as a palette decision in any painting school. ...