Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism

Judges' Comments

Visions of Nature is a sophisticated text which speaks directly to some of the key concerns of our times: environmental degradation, scientific and technological revolution, and the legacies of imperial expansion into Indigenous lands. Through an expert analysis of late nineteenth-century landscape photography in Australia, New Zealand and the US, Jarrod Hore provides a masterclass in environmental and settler colonial history, ensuring that Visions of Nature will remain an influential text for generations to come. 

Using an innovative transnational approach, Hore draws together personal, scientific, commercial and state-based collections to help us understand settler colonialism anew, demonstrating that at their core, settlers saw themselves as belonging in new, wild and untouched landscapes. Hore is across both the complex scientific history of photography as well as the dense historiographies of settler colonial peoples and places, rendering his scholarship erudite in multiple fields of historical enquiry. This marvellous book will help us all ‘see’ in new, more critical ways.