Believe it or not, perspectography is more than the silly concatenation of the words perspective and photography. Webster's Dictionary defines it as:
"The science or art of delineating objects according to the laws of perspective; the theory of perspective."
Interestingly, the concept of perspective, and how to produce the effect in art, did not become a subject of sustained study until the Rennaisance. Leonardo Davinci was the first to explore the concept of Linear Perspective, a technique we have all seen used in the oil paintings of the last 500 years.
This painting, "Bristol, Broad Quay" (artist unknown: circa 1730), is a pefect example of linear perspective being employed to make the viewer feel as though they are truly looking "down" the street, at buildings in the distance. But the artist has also used a few other tricks such as texture, clarity, gradient, and interposition to help this illusion along. The houses that are "further" away are smaller, less defined, and brighter than the foreground, the lines of the canal and street converge as they move into the background, and of course, the people get smaller too. Seems simple, really, but there is an "art" to it (excuse the lame pun).
Of course we also see it in use in everyday life, like this ad,
for example: our minds make the automatic adjustment/assumption that the bottles are getting further away, and not simply getting smaller! ($10 to anyone who knows what "Anis del Tigre" is...)
But perspective also has a subtly different connotation - that of an individual's subjective perception of an object/thing. And so we get to photography (at last...). Photography is largely about the perspective of the eye behind the glass, how that person views the world, what draws them in, and sometimes more importantly what doesn't! It's about looking at things differently, and even if we don't see value in an image, it behooves us to think for a minute on why someone bothered to capture, print, post, mail, that image (perhaps with the exception of blurry photos of some people's pets...).