Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism

Visions of Nature revives the work of a cast of late nineteenth-century landscape photographers who shaped the environmental attitudes of settlers from Australia to 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 recreated 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 settler work of these photographers out of their provincial contexts and repositions it within a sweeping new comparative frame.