Chapter 10: Images, Maps, and the (De)Stabilization of National Master Narratives in Argentina

People usually believe that images in general, and maps in particular, offer a more accurate and less ambiguous representation of reality than language does. This belief is rooted in a modern conception of the image developed by the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, which postulates the objective nature of images in the field of scientific knowledge (Daston & Galison, 2007). Beyond the scientific field, the popular expression “a picture is worth a thousand words” claims the eloquence of an image, expressing how people conceive of graphic representations in everyday life. Rose (2003) showed that the meaning of images is ambiguous and that the same image can cause different effects and create different ideas in different subjects. The value of images, as instruments for building a representation of the world, is currently so immense that an app like Google Earth can show different representations and toponyms of currently disputed territories, based on the geographic location of the device connected to the internet (Bensinger, 2020).