History on Wednesday: The Settler Revolution in Focus: How Landscape Photographers Shaped Environmental Attachment
The Settler Revolution in Focus: How Landscape Photographers Shaped Environmental Attachment
Dr Jarrod Hore | 12:10pm, 1 March, 2023
This paper introduces and surveys the work of a number of late nineteenth-century landscape photographers who shaped the environmental attitudes of settlers in Australia and the American West. Capitalising on popular and elite interest in wilderness imagery, photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge, John Beattie, and Alfred Burton produced work that sustained settler belonging and produced new ways of thinking about territory, place, and history. This paper focuses on and links the work of these three figures, situating their visions of nature and identifying how similar practices and politics defined settler colonial landscape photography in this period in California, Tasmania, and New Zealand. These sites were shaped on the one hand by the practices of dispossession that enabled widespread European migration and settlement, and on the other by the emergence of intense territorial and environmental investments. I suggest that landscape photography offers a fresh perspective on this settler colonial world, foregrounding new environmental attitudes and their immediate effects for both colonists and Indigenous peoples.
About the speaker
Dr Jarrod Hore is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Sydney and Co-Director of the New Earth Histories Research Group. He is a historian of environments, geologies, and photographies and the author of Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism (University of California Press, 2022).
——
Where
School of Humanities Common Room – A22, Level 8, A18 Brennan MacCullum Building. Spaces are limited for in-person tickets, so please register as soon as possible if you would like to reserve a spot.
Zoom info to be sent ahead of the event.
To join our mailing list, simply subscribe here