Visions of Nature How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism

"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

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.