The most famous photograph of Earth was taken upside down.
On 7 December 1972, an Apollo 17 astronaut, most often credited as Harrison Schmitt, photographed the whole Earth through a Hasselblad window, 29,400 km out. In the original frame — AS17-148-22727 — Antarctica gleams white at the top. Africa stretches to the right. A cyclone churns in the Indian Ocean. This is what Earth actually looks like from that angle.
NASA rotated the image 180° before releasing it, “because people are more accustomed to north-up images of Earth.” The planet itself had to be corrected to match our maps. Two years earlier, they’d done the same thing to the Earthrise photograph — rotating it 135° so Earth appeared to “rise” above the lunar horizon.
No one has been far enough from Earth to take this photograph since. There is no up in space.
“There is no north or south in space. Only closer and further from the sun.” Buckminster Fuller
The word ‘orientation’ comes from Latin oriens — ‘east.’
Medieval maps placed east at the top because that’s where Paradise was — the word “orientation” itself is a fossil of that practice. Arab cartographers put south at the top: al-Idrisi’s Tabula Rogeriana (1154), engraved on a six-foot silver disc for the King of Sicily, was the most accurate world map for three centuries — and it had south on top. Ancient Egyptians followed the Nile: south was upstream, south was up.
North claimed the top of the map around 500 years ago, when European navigators standardised their compass-centric view and the printing press locked it in place. It was never inevitable. It was a decision — and like all decisions, it carried politics.
On a Mercator map, Greenland looks roughly the size of Africa. In reality, Africa is fourteen times larger.
You could fit the United States, China, India, and most of Europe inside Africa — with room to spare. Brazil appears insignificant next to North America; it’s actually larger than the contiguous United States. Alaska looks as large as Brazil — Brazil is nearly five times bigger.
Mercator designed his projection in 1569 for sailors. It was never meant to represent the world. But classrooms, newsrooms, and tech companies adopted it as the default, and for centuries it has inflated the Northern Hemisphere while shrinking the Global South — the same territories that were colonised by the people who made the maps. In 2010, German designer Kai Krause coined a word for this: immappancy — insufficient geographical knowledge caused by misleading maps, a sibling of illiteracy and innumeracy.
In 2017, Boston became the first US city to replace Mercator with the Gall-Peters projection in public schools. 86% of their students are students of colour. As assistant superintendent Colin Rose said: “The start of a three-year effort to decolonise the curriculum.” In August 2025, the African Union endorsed the Correct The Map campaign — led by Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa, advocating Equal Earth — which AU Commission Deputy Chairperson Selma Malika Haddadi framed as “reclaiming Africa’s rightful place on the global stage.”
The institutions are following. The World Bank is phasing out Mercator in favour of Equal Earth, “committed to ensuring accurate representation of all people, on all platforms.” NASA and National Geographic now use Equal Earth too. Nebraska went further: statute 79-734.02, effective for the 2024-25 school year, requires that schools “shall only use the Gall-Peters projection map or a similar cylindrical equal-area projection map or the AuthaGraph projection map.” Mercator is still permitted, but only as a teaching aid — to show that all maps are flawed.
Every projection distorts something. But not every distortion has been so convenient for power.
“Every projection distorts something. But not every distortion has been so convenient for power.”
Every projection is a compromise. Here’s what the compromise looks like.
Mark Monmonier called it the cartographic paradox: “To present a useful and truthful picture, an accurate map must tell white lies.” Every projection sacrifices something. Mercator became the default through empire, not merit. These nine projections show the range of what’s possible when you question the frame.
Mercator
The one everyone knows. The one that lies. Greenland appears the size of Africa. Europe sits at centre. Five centuries of colonial cartography baked into every classroom wall.
Gall-Peters
The one that started the culture war. Ugly on purpose. Every stretched, distorted continent is an accusation. Boston put it in classrooms. Nebraska wrote it into law.
Equal Earth
The modern replacement. Equal-area like Peters but actually beautiful. If you’re making one map for a dissertation or presentation, this is it.
Robinson
The compromise projection. Neither equal-area nor conformal, but it looks right. National Geographic adopted it, then abandoned it. The acceptable middle ground.
Mollweide
The soft ellipse. Two centuries old, still the best shape for thematic data viz. Its oval frame quietly insists the world isn’t a rectangle.
Dymaxion
No up, no down, no centre. An icosahedron unfolded. Fuller’s argument: there is no north in space. Jasper Johns painted it. The triangles can be rearranged to tell different stories.
Waterman Butterfly
The most beautiful projection, full stop. A truncated octahedron unfolded into a butterfly shape. Minimal distortion everywhere. The map as aesthetic provocation.
Goode’s Homolosine
The globe peeled like an orange. The interruptions are the message: every projection involves cutting, and where you cut reveals what you value.
Azimuthal Equidistant
The counter-mapping weapon. Centre it on any community and the world radiates outward from their perspective. Used on the UN flag and in Indigenous cartography.
“Nuestro norte es el Sur.”
“Our north is the South. There should be no north for us, except in opposition to our South. That is why we now turn the map upside down.”
Joaquín Torres García · Uruguayan artist and theorist · The School of the South · 1935Torres García had worked at Gaudí’s studio on stained glass in Barcelona and co-founded Cercle et Carré in Paris with Michel Seuphor, exhibiting alongside Kandinsky and Léger. He returned to Montevideo in 1934, set out the upside-down argument in his 1935 manifesto The School of the South, and drew América Invertida in 1943 — a 22 × 16 cm pen-and-ink drawing of South America with its south pointing up, marked with pre-Columbian symbols: a sun, a fish, a ship sailing toward Uruguay. It became a rallying cry for an entire continent’s intellectual independence. Today it appears on magnets, shirts, and notebooks across Uruguay. MoMA gave him a retrospective in 2015.
At twelve, he drew a south-up map. His teacher gave him a failing grade.
In 1970, a twelve-year-old boy in Melbourne drew a south-up map for a school project. His geography teacher failed it, demanding the “correct” orientation.
At fifteen, on exchange in Japan, American students mocked him for coming from “the bottom of the world.” He vowed to publish a corrective map.
At twenty-one, Stuart McArthur launched McArthur’s Universal Corrective Map of the World on Australia Day, 1979, from the steps of Melbourne University. Australia sat confidently at the top. The map’s own inset read: “Never again to suffer the perpetual onslaught of ‘Down Under’ jokes — implications from Northern nations that the height of a country’s prestige is determined by its equivalent spatial location on a conventional map.” It has sold over 350,000 copies. Proof that one stubborn Australian can shift a paradigm.
Artists & architects who flipped the script
Guy Debord
Cut the map of Paris into fragments and reassembled them based on emotion, not geography. His psychogeographic maps of the dérive dismantled the planner’s claim to objectivity. “Drop your usual motives for movement,” he wrote, “and let yourself be drawn by the attractions of the terrain.”
Mona Hatoum
A neon globe where every continent is a crisis zone. Maps cast in soap and glass beads that crumble underfoot. Territory as fragile material, geography as violence.
Buckminster Fuller
Unfolded the globe into an icosahedron with no inherent top or bottom. Countries float without hierarchy. The whole map can be rearranged like a net.
William Kentridge
Animated charcoal drawings where maps of Johannesburg dissolve and redraw themselves. Borders erased and redrawn in real time — apartheid geography as living wound.
Öyvind Fahlström
World maps with moveable magnetic pieces. Viewers rearrange countries, rewrite borders, redistribute power. The map was never finished — and that was the point.
Stuart McArthur
Published the Universal Corrective Map from the steps of Melbourne University on Australia Day, 1979. South on top. 350,000 copies sold. Proof one stubborn Australian can shift a paradigm.
Joyce Kozloff
Four decades of paintings that treat maps not as neutral tools, but as instruments of influence, ideology, and control. Her survey Contested Territories runs at the Everson Museum, 25 September 2025 to 5 April 2026.
When we say things “went south,” we mean they went wrong.
Research shows that people associate north positions on maps with wealth, prestige, and higher altitude, while south positions are linked to poverty and lower status. Brian Meier at Gettysburg College proved the critical finding: when participants were shown south-up maps, the bias completely disappeared. The preference isn’t cognitive — it’s cultural, learned through the deep metaphorical chain linking north to up to good to powerful.
Thomas Saarinen collected 3,568 freehand world maps from students in 52 countries. 79% were Eurocentric — even students in Africa, Asia, and Latin America drew Europe at the centre and Africa diminished. His most devastating observation: students from formerly colonised countries drew maps with the colonial power at centre, illustrating “the idea that the centre lies elsewhere.”
- “Heading up north”
- “Going down south”
- “Down Under”
- “Top of the world”
- “Things went south”
- “Developing world”
“The map is not a picture. It is an argument.” Denis Wood · The Power of Maps · 1992
Nine ways of saying the same thing: maps are not neutral.
From courtrooms to classrooms, from poetry to code, people across disciplines have challenged the map on the wall. What emerges is a chorus — politicians, philosophers, poets, hackers, and twelve-year-olds, all arriving at the same conclusion: how we orient the world on paper shapes how we inhabit it.
Colin Rose · Boston Public Schools · 2017“Eighty-six percent of our students are students of color and many have parents from places on the map that are underscale or distorted. It only seems right that we would present them with an accurate view of themselves.”
Boston became the first US district to adopt the Gall-Peters projection. 600 classrooms. 57,000 students. Cost: $12,000.
Henri Lefebvre · The Production of Space · 1974“The reduction of three-dimensional realities to two dimensions has conferred a redoubtable power — a violence intrinsic to abstraction.”
David Harvey documented the cost: in Mumbai, slum dwellers live “without legal title — the places they live are left blank on all maps of the city.”
Opi Nenquimo · Waorani leader · Ecuador · 2019“Our map shows all of the things that don’t have a price. Building it we also build our communities.”
The Waorani used open-source mapping tools to chart their territory and sued the government for drilling without consent. They won.
The West Wing · Season 2, Episode 16 · 2001“Yeah, but you can’t do that.” — “Why not?” — “Because it’s freaking me out.”
18 million viewers watched a fictional cartography group flip the map south-up on network television. The scene became a classroom staple.
Deleuze & Guattari · A Thousand Plateaus · 1980“Make a map, not a tracing. The map is entirely oriented toward experimentation in contact with the real. It can be torn, reversed, adapted, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation.”
Foucault argued “space is fundamental in any exercise of power.” Said coined “imaginative geography.” Mignolo showed how colonial maps erased indigenous spatial knowledge.
Simon Weckert · Google Maps Hacks · 2020“There’s a blindness that arises from thinking of data as objective, unambiguous and interpretation free.”
Weckert loaded 99 smartphones into a handcart and walked past Google HQ, turning every street red on Google Maps and diverting real traffic.
J.B. Harley · Deconstructing the Map · 1989“Much of the power of the map is that it operates behind a mask of a seemingly neutral science. It hides and denies its social dimensions at the same time as it legitimates.”
The most cited essay in critical cartography. Harley’s verdict: “To those who have strength in the world shall be added strength in the map.”
Wisława Szymborska · Map (final poem) · 2012“I like maps, because they lie. Because they give no access to the vicious truth. Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly they spread before me a world not of this world.”
The Polish Nobel laureate was working on this poem when she died. Bishop, Borges, Walcott, Glissant — poets have always known maps are fictions.
Mafalda (Quino) · Argentina · 1964–1973“The southern hemisphere is so undeveloped because the ideas fall off.”
Quino drew entire pages of the comic strip upside down to illustrate Mafalda’s point. She nailed her father’s globe to the wall with the South Pole on top, and the panels only returned to normal after she’d “fixed” it. The first English translation was finally published in 2025. She was six years old and she understood everything.
A growing network of counter-cartographers is redrawing the world.
Across continents, indigenous communities, forensic researchers, activist collectives, and open-source mappers are building alternatives to the colonial cartographic tradition. These projects don’t just flip the map — they question who gets to draw it in the first place.
Native Land Digital
Interactive map of indigenous territories, treaties, and languages. Over 200 nations’ boundaries, drawn by the nations themselves.
Forensic Architecture
Uses spatial analysis, 3D modelling, and satellite imagery to investigate state violence and human rights abuses.
Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
Documents displacement and resistance in San Francisco, New York, and beyond. Maps as tools of tenant solidarity.
The Decolonial Atlas
Crowd-sourced collection of maps that challenge dominant geographic narratives. “Decolonisation is a process of unlearning and rediscovering.”
Correct The Map
Launched in Dakar, 2025. Endorsed by the African Union. Calling for the global replacement of Mercator with projections that show Africa at its true scale. “The biggest lie in geography is about Africa.”
Detroit Geographic Expedition
1960s radical geography project that trained Black Detroiters to map their own neighbourhoods, documenting inequality from the inside.
Iconoclasistas
Argentine collective creating participatory maps and infographics with communities to visualise resistance, territory, and collective memory.
kollektiv orangotango
Editors of This Is Not an Atlas, the open-access anthology of counter-cartographies from 40+ countries.
Geochicas
Women and non-binary mappers closing the gender gap in OpenStreetMap. Mapping femicides, safe spaces, and invisible labour across Latin America.
Map Kibera
Thirteen young Nairobians trained with GPS and OpenStreetMap to map Africa’s largest informal settlement — a complete blank spot on official maps. Making the invisible visible.
Ushahidi
Crowdsourced crisis-mapping born from Kenya’s 2007 disputed election. Deployed in 160+ countries with over 50 million reports. Testimony as technology.
Go deeper.
- This Is Not an Atlas
- The Power of Maps
- Deconstructing the Map
- The True Size Of…
- Universalismo Constructivo
- How to Lie with Maps
- Native Land Digital
- Mapping: A Critical Introduction
- Patas Arriba (Upside Down)
- A Field Guide to Getting Lost
- The Map as Art
- Close Up at a Distance
- Blank Spots on the Map
- This Way Up
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” Eduardo Galeano · Patas Arriba · 1998
Look
again.
The next time you open a map on your phone, notice where north is. Notice what’s big and what’s small. Notice what’s at the centre and what’s been pushed to the edge.
Then ask yourself: who decided this was the right way to look at the world?
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