As part of my coursework in Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia, I am performing a series of GIS (Geographic Information System) analyses of the Monticello Road project. GIS provides empirical data to check (or underscore) what intuition tells us. This is the second of a three-part meta analysis. Previous: Vanishing Landscapes | To Come: Backer Distribution
I often receive process questions about the project, especially as pertains to what parts of the neighborhood I photograph and I how I define the boundaries of the Monticello Road study area.
I typically answer that I consciously limit the project to the street and directly-adjacent properties
and I believe that the images will be distributed throughout the length of the street—though not
evenly, perhaps clustered around my home or a few places where I spend sedentary time. These
responses are logical but not empirical. GIS analysis lets us answer the question with data.
Through the life of the project, I have captured thousands of images, which would have been overwhelming. One of the features of photography is that it not particularly relevant if an image is made; what matters is which images are seen.
I have a subset of selects (numbering in the low hundreds) that are used in the book and the frequent slideshows I present. That provides a further curation because it reflects both a photographer’s view of what is visually interesting and an editor’s view of what says something about the place. I refined my selection one more time by eliminating multiple images all taken at the same time (different people at the same party, for example). Through this process, I reduced the sample to 94 images, a highly manageable number, but enough for a meaningful analysis of a linear mile-long space.
