Mandala.

This is the photograph on the cover of: The Significance of Monuments by Richard Bradley.
From the introduction:

"The cover illustration is taken from a one-person touring exhibition called ‘Petrified Garden’ organized by An Lanntair Gallery, Stornoway, Scotland. The picture is a photo-montage made by photographing sections of a stone circle and the horizon from a height of 6.5 metres, with the camera on a pole.

Using a flash at night mimics what the stone circle might look like with a central fire,which was one of the curious features of these Aberdeenshire stone circles. Stone circles in the British Isles show enough of a theme and variation in their design to suggest that if we knew the missing elements in each case then the variety of monument types would reduce to a smaller group of pictures on the ground.

Just one of many possibilities is that these circles are an expression of the way Neolithic peoples related to their surrounding landscape. The following text accompanied the exhibition and is my response to a way of seeing unrestrained by the painter’s rules of perspective, or the frame of the photograph or television"

Richard Bradley.

In a single photograph, the horizon is a line from one side of the frame to the other. Do we really see our surroundings in this way? No, because we look around, we don’t look at. In this way the horizon is a circle, and we are always at the centre of the circle.

Even though we define a circle visually wherever we stand, we need not be conscious of ourselves doing the looking, so we define a circle with a hole in the middle. That is the human condition.

As we look we also unconsciously magnify the horizon. With the discovery of perspective, a painter could convey distance by making objects on the horizon appear very small. But we see the horizon as bigger than that. A photograph never does justice to the ‘grand view’ to which we aspire because the hills in the distance are smaller than we remembered. The human mind is easily capable of imagining its surroundings from a vantage point above eye-level. Reality in this sense is more map-like. It makes more sense to imagine things from above because the brain needs less memory to make one useful picture – like a template – from which to infer necessary information as we move about.

It may be the case that our perception and our cosmology are intimately bound together, and that discovering the meaning of lost cultures will require the simple question to be answered: How did they look at their surroundings?

Mark Johnston 1997