The loss of a sense of place, and the increasing experience of a general sense of placelessness, is often taken to be one of the characteristic features of modernity. It is a feature usually taken closely tied to the enormous changes in communication and information technologies that have occurred over the last century. With the internet and the digital technologies associated with it place no longer seems to have any significance at all, and it has instead been replaced by a network of equally accessible locations within a single ‘space’.

Associated with this is the widespread view that place is inevitably connected with exclusion and violence, and with reactionary and conservative forms of politics. Place stands for a closed, exclusionary provincalism (belonging, rootedness, tradition homeland) in a cosmopolitan global world. In Australia it stands for an exclusionary politics in which “others” (non-whites) have been excluded on the grounds of race.

The history of place within the Western philosophical tradition has generally been one in which place has increasingly been seen as secondary to space—typically to a particular (physicalist) notion of space as homogeneous, measurable extension—and so reduced to a notion of position, simple location, or else mere “site.” Place is reduced to an arbitrary region of physical space.

Yet human life remains tied to specific times and places – we find ourselves already “there,” in the world, in “place”, as Heidegger pointed out. The words place, home, situatedness, and involvement form a grouping that is often structured around place, belonging, and identity that refer to our “being-in-the-world.”

Thus Aboriginal-Australians have a conception of human life, and of all life, as inextricably bound up with the land and place. Consequently, for an Aboriginal person to be removed from that country to which he or she belongs is for them to be deprived of their very identity ans being, and often in past times such removal – particularly when it involved imprisonment – frequently led to sickness and death.

Photography itself arise out a certain sort of situatedness--- being in a place refers to gathered “region” or “locale” in which we find ourselves along with other persons and things. It refers to a special relation to landscape. We can view the landscape itself as one of the ways in which place is formed, and also, one of the modes of our own self-formation. It has, as in the above photo, what Jeff Malpas calls a ‘bounded openness’, as well as having a dynamic element– place is that wherein things happen, in which things ‘take place’.

What is referred to in the photo is a sense of place, which Malpas says refers:

both to a sense of the character or identity that belongs to certain places or locales, and to a sense of our own identity as shaped in relation to those places, such that we might even be said to belong to those places.

Malpas rejects this interpretation in favour of one that refers us to the Aboriginal-Australian existential ground understanding. This refers to the:

way in which to be is always to be in some place – place is the ground on which ourexistence is based, and in and through which it is articulated. We are who and what we are through our relatedness to what exists around us, but such relatedness is itself inseparable from the specificity of our own locatedness, from the place, and places, in which we live. Our existence is, then, fundamentally a matter of our being ‘in’ place, our being ‘there’.