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.

'Photography and Australia' focuses on those aspects of photographic practice that can be considered distinctively Australian. It argues that the colonial experience has been crucial in shaping photographers' concerns.

Photography in Colonial Australia examines the Australian books of the nineteenth century that use original photographs as a means of illustration. For the first time in Australia, Robert Holden has assessed the importance of photographically illustrated books. Part One of Photography in Colonial Australia is an historical survey, looking at issues like colonisation through photography and whether it was a nineteenth-century photographer's role to create images like an artist, or to accurately recreate the image before the camera's eye like a mirror. Part Two of the work focuses on a range of photographic genres; specifically royalty, Aborigines, exploration and travel, science, varia and art. Any person with an interest in photography, nineteenth-century social history, illustrated books, or bibliography will find this work an invaluable reference. Sixty-five photographic illustrations and a full bibliography of 130 items makes Photography in Colonial Australia the standard cited source, and this important text is further enhanced by an extensive index of photographers and publishers. 'This pioneering work by Robert Holden, which details 130 publications issued in Australia before 1900... will place one country's publishing curiosities in an international context...' (from the foreword by Lucien Goldschmidt, world authority on photographically illustrated books).

James William Newland’s (1810–1857) career as a showman daguerreotypist began in the United States but expanded into Central and South America, across the Pacific to New Zealand and colonial Australia and onto India. Newland used the latest developments in photography, theatre and spectacle to create powerful new visual experiences for audiences in each of these volatile colonial societies. This book assesses his surviving, vivid portraits against other visual ephemera and archival records of his time. Newland’s magic lantern and theatre shows are imaginatively reconstructed from textual sources and analysed, with his short, rich career casting a new light on the complex worlds of the mid-nineteenth century. It provides a revealing case study of someone brokering new experiences with optical technologies for varied audiences at the forefront of the age of modern vision. This book will be of interest to scholars in art and visual culture, photography, the history of photography and Victorian history.

4e de couverture : This book investigates the historical practice of producing stereotyped spectacles of colonized peoples at the great exhibitions and in colonial photography, and relates it to the shaping of European and settler identities. In doing so, it singles out the homogeneous aspects of colonialism's culture as well as distinguishing its discontinuities. By comparing the images produced in Britain and France with those produced in North America, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific, Japan, and China, it proposes that differences in representations of colonized peoples between the imperial centres and the colonies were the result of different social and political agendas. By focusing on the images connected to anthropology, dying race theory, travel, tourism, and portraiture, Maxwell argues that while some photographs were directed at naturalizing the precept of colonialism, others were used to criticize it and to empower indigenous subjects. Written from a postcolonial perspective, and pursuing an interdisciplinary approach, this book will be of interest to scholars, students, and researchers intent on knowing more about the images of racial and cultural difference that shaped our immediate past.

Catalog of an exhibition held March 21 - Jun 8, 2015, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and July 4 - October 11, 2015, at the Queensland Art Gallery.