"At the scene of crime anything might be relevant"
This is a classic archaeological question of a place or site. It concerns focus - what should be studied, listed, recorded, preserved? And what, in contrast, is irrelevant, to be discarded and forgotten?
What is significant? What is inconsequential? What is signal, what background noise?
The task is to identify symptomatic details, substantive evidence, and to frame these that a coherent picture or narrative may be made.
Figure/ground relationships form a tropic field at the heart of the archaeological imagination, the title of a new book of mine, to be published in 2009.
Figure/ground relationships are a key matter also in graphic design - what stands out as figure or subject against/in relation to background/setting?
My photoblog http://FigureAndGround.org explores these questions. A particular interest is in landscape and archaeography - the figure in the land, setting, focus and blur, detail and resolution, perspective, arrangement, framing.
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Links and more information
Figure and ground - a glossary
The archaeological imagination
The noise of history
Figure-ground relationships and the archaeological imagination - a talk
Boonville, California
