Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from Clovis to Nixon Main Menu Regimes: Ruling the Los Angeles Region from the Late Pleistocene to the 21st Century Places and Paths of Los Angeles Manna From Hell: Power and Politics from Region to World Power Shadows: Visual Cultures and Mass Media of a Regional and Global Power Segregated Diversity: The Geosocial Formation of Social Justice in the Late Twentieth Century Richard 37th: Nixon, Los Angeles, and World Power The American 1989: Los Angeles at the Climax of the 20th Century Narrative Essay Bibliographies, Filmographies, Gazeteers, Indexes Mapping the Past: Theory, Methods, Historiography Path Credits Root

Ghost Maps

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Ghost maps are hand-crafted composites of archival analog cartography and vector-based digital GIS layers. They are designed visually to reveal time, change, events, and motion through the symbolic languages of color, shape, iconography, and textual annotation. They are dense, deep maps, not made to be read quickly, as would be mere illustrations or diagrams. As a rich and complex graphical composition drawn directly from the profound complexity of past social life itself, the content of a ghost map—like the metropolis itself—exceeds the capacity of any textual narrative to explain it. Each ghost map, crafted in pictorial language, is a free-standing document, offered for the reader to ponder and to puzzle over, to return to many times.
As the critical history of cartography has made clear, maps are as imaginary as they are objective. When composed by the historian to recount the past, however, the geometric and the metaphoric can be deliberately coordinated to achieve that which the art of historical narrative has always sought: to move and persuade the reader/viewer. Alongside my textual narratives and ghost maps, I compose photomontages, panoramas, and mosaics of photographic stills and other forms of graphic depiction. These compositions are both denotative—showing factually the where and the when, and connotative—implying meaningful relations among the visual components. As “call-outs” or “wormholes,” these photographic compositions are also indexed to points and shapes in the ghost maps. Visualizations of complex historical phenomena, as they took place, these compositions draw much of their representational power from the indexical nature of photography—a direct record of the past.