Visions of Nature

"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