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University of California Press

Visions of Nature

How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism

by Jarrod Hore (Author)
Price: $29.95 / £25.00
Publication Date: Apr 2022
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 352
ISBN: 9780520420496
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 53 b/w photographs
Endowments:

About the Book

Visions of Nature revives the work of late nineteenth-century landscape photographers who shaped the environmental attitudes of settlers in the colonies of the Tasman World and in California. Despite having little association with one another, these photographers developed remarkably similar visions of nature. They rode a wave of interest in wilderness imagery and made pictures that were hung in settler drawing rooms, perused in albums, projected in theaters, and re-created on vacations. In both the American West and the Tasman World, landscape photography fed into settler belonging and produced new ways of thinking about territory and history. During this key period of settler revolution, a generation of photographers came to associate “nature” with remoteness, antiquity, and emptiness, a perspective that disguised the realities of Indigenous presence and reinforced colonial fantasies of environmental abundance. This book lifts the work of these photographers out of their provincial contexts and repositions it within a new comparative frame.

About the Author

Jarrod Hore is an environmental historian and Co-Director of the New Earth Histories Research Program at University of New South Wales, Sydney.

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments 

Introduction: Dispossession in Focus: Between
Ancestral Ties and Settler Territoriality

1. Six Geobiographies: Senses of Site in the White Settler World
2. Space and the Settler Geographical Imagination: The Survey, the Camera, and the 
   Problematic of Waste
3. A Clock for Seeing: Revelation and Rupture in Settler Colonial Landscapes
4. Tanga Whakaāhua or, the Man Who Makes the Likenesses: Managing Indigenous Presence in
   Colonial Landscapes
5. Colonial Encounter, Epochal Time, and Settler Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century
6. Noble Cities from Primeval Forest: Settler Territoriality on the World Stage
7. Settler Nativity: Nations and Nature into the Twentieth Century

Conclusion: Settler Colonialism, Reconciliation, and the Problems of Place

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

"Visions of Nature… is a rigorous and broad-ranging exploration that spans the highly local to the constructed ‘global’ and offers its readers new threads and connections to follow."
H-Net: Humanities and Social Science Reviews Online
"Hore has written a series of microhistories that combine to tell a fascinating transnational narrative of late-19th-century colonial environmentalism."
Journal of Australian Studies
"Visions of Nature is a well-researched, unique work in the field of environmental history, geography, settler colonial theory, and the history of photography. The book takes a bold approach to its subject matter and pulls together immense amounts of information and evidence from various intellectual fields of study and geographical regions and is a significant work of interdisciplinary research."
Journal of Arizona History
"Jarrod Hore brilliantly adds the camera, its photographs, and its photographers to our understanding of past landscapes. We see afresh just what these visions of nature enabled and curtailed, conjured and sequestered. An important book as we move into another generation's appraisal of the environmental history of settler colonialism."—Alison Bashford, Director of the New Earth Histories Program, University of New South Wales, Sydney

"Visions of Nature analyzes landscape photography as an instrument of empire, revealing the cultural and political work done by these artists of light. On both sides of the Pacific, colonists hauled their cameras to distant places to capture nature for the grand task of nation building. Their images depicted an ideal natural world that was romantic, empty, and available for the settler project. Jarrod Hore brilliantly combines science, art, and landscape in a compelling comparative history of environmental transformation and Indigenous dispossession."—Tom Griffiths, Professor Emeritus, Australian National University 

"There is nothing else quite like this book at present. Based on six early photographers' work in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, it combines environmental history, settler colonial studies, and imperial history to explain how the image of a vast, empty wilderness, occluding Indigenous occupation and usage, was generated to create a sense of settler achievement and ownership. Essential reading for those interested in any of these fields of study."—Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Sussex, and author of Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire 

"Jarrod Hore provides an important new perspective on settler colonialism in revealing the role of photography in imaginatively defining and claiming territory around the Pacific Rim. Bringing together visual culture, environmental history, and settler colonialism to powerful effect, this sophisticated and original study will find wide readership."—Jane Lydon, Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History, University of Western Australia 

Awards

  • W.K. Hancock Prize Shortlist 2024 2024, Australian Historical Association
  • Marilyn Lake Prize for Australian Transnational History 2023 2023, Australian Historical Association
  • Donna Coates Prize 2022 2023, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand Studies Network (ACNZSN)
  • NSW PREMIER’S HISTORY AWARDS (General History Category) 2023 Shortlist 2023, State Library of NSW