Purpose of Phase Information
I don't think of the phase as providing information related to position or location.

A simple example might be illustrative. In 1-D, consider these two signals, x and y:

t = 0:0.001:0.1;
x = cos(2*pi*20*t) + cos(2*pi*30*t);
y = cos(2*pi*20*t + pi/4) + cos(2*pi*30*t - pi/6);


The magnitude spectrums of x and y are the same, but they're not the same signal; if you plot them, you'll see that they're different. In the frequency domain, you need both the magnitude and the phase to fully describe the signals. It doesn't make sense to refer to the harmonics as "being somewhere".