This reading shows a connection between our previous conversations about place as culture, as well as our conversations about power and Power. He draws the connection to place as culture when he says “landscape is already artifice in the moment of its beholding, long before it becomes the subject of pictorial representation” (Mitchell,169). By saying that the landscape has intrinsic social and cultural significance before it is depicted by an artist, he is recognizing the underlying structural Powers that form the perception of said landscape. His deconstruction of landscape as Western-centric and modern connect to our conversations about cartography and our own perceptions of maps and depictions of landscapes. He evokes this thinking in his 3rd thesis, where he states: “Like money, landscape is a social hieroglyph that conceals the actual basis of its value. it does so by naturalizing its conventions and conventionalizing its nature” (Mitchell,166). Since landscape is a part of who we are as individuals and as members of a society, when we look critically at maps and landscape it seems to go against even the most seemingly natural and universal principals we have. This is a place where I get stuck when looking at Allen Island and its nature. While the island has many astounding “natural” qualities to it, like the ferns the sporadic forests, these images came from Betsy’s own interpretation of nature. When you’re on the island, you cannot deny that it is naturally beautiful. However, if it is the realization of someone’s image of what nature is or what a specific landscape should look like, can it be taken as an undeniably “natural” or “true” landscape?