Description

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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

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

Praise For…

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"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