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Photography and Exploration

Modern exploration is inconceivable without photography, yet to date few scholars have considered the relationship between these practices in a detailed or rigorous way. Photography and Exploration is the first book-length study of the place of photography in practices of exploration. It examines how, since the invention of photography in 1839, explorers, sponsors, and publishers employed the medium to promote individual and institutional achievements and reputations. Late nineteenth-century advances in technology—and photography’s newfound cultural currency as a truthful witness to the world—made the camera an indispensable tool to exploring ventures, great and small. The book considers a variety of examples, from polar journeys to space missions, from both well-known and little-studied collections. It argues that exploration photographs have been created, circulated, and consumed as objects of both scientific research and art. It also shows how government-sponsored expeditions have employed images as a means to scientific advancement or territorial conquest. It argues that because exploration has long been bound up with the construction of national and imperial identity, expeditionary photographs have often been used to promote claims to power. However the book also shows how expeditionary photographs may challenge the way audiences perceive the world and their place within it. This publication develops the author’s existing expertise in this field. It argues that photographs need to be understood as material objects as well as visual images and that the meaning of photographs is dynamic, generated through particular encounters between images, people and places. Photography and Exploration shines new light on how photography has shaped the image of explorers, expeditions, and the worlds they discovered. In so doing the book makes a significant contribution to debates on the history of photography and cultures of exploration across a several disciplines including historical geography, anthropology, history of photography and visual culture.

This monograph examines the complex relationship between photography and cultures of exploration. Distilling a decade of research across numerous collections, and considering a range of examples, the book shows how exploration photographs have been created, circulated and consumed as science and art. Conceptually inter-disciplinary, and empirically rich, the book argues for the better appreciation of both photography and exploration as mediated cultural practices. Examining expeditionary photographs as material objects with mutable meanings, the book contributes to a dynamic field of enquiry, of especial interest to historical and cultural geographers, but also to historians of art, science, anthropology, photography and exploration.