1st Edition
Survey Practices and Landscape Photography Across the Globe
This edited volume considers the many ways in which landscape (seen and unseen) is fundamental to placemaking, colonial settlement, and identity formation. Collectively, the book’s authors map a constellation of interlocking photographic histories and survey practices, decentering Europe as the origin of camera-based surveillance. The volume charts a conversation across continents - connecting Europe, Africa, the Arab World, Asia, and the Americas. It does not segregate places, histories, and traditions but rather puts them in dialogue with one another, establishing solidarity across ever-shifting national, linguistic, racial, religious, and ethnic. Refusing the neat organization of survey photographs into national or imperial narratives, these essays celebrate the messy, cross-cultural reverberations of landscape over the past 170 years. Considering the visual, social, and historical networks in which these images circulate, this anthology connects the many entangled and political histories of photography in order to reframe survey practices and the multidimensionality of landscape as an international phenomenon. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, history of photography, and landscape history.
1. Introduction: Survey Practices Across the Globe
Erin Hyde Nolan and Sophie Junge
Part 1: Landscape, Heritage and the Colonization of Space
2. The Great Game: The Making of Dunhuang as "Heritage" Site in Photography (1900–1945)
Mia Yinxing Liu
3. Historical Topographies: Thomas Johnson Westropp, Antiquarianism, and Cultural Identity
Justin Carville
4. Surveying in the Dutch Colonial Archive: Reproduction, Authorship, and Postcolonial Ownership
Sophie Junge
5. Sammy Baloji: Extractive Landscapes
Lotte Arndt and Sammy Baloji
Part 2: Border Control: From Sea to Shining Sea
6. Colonial Aesthetic or Military Narrative? On the Violence Behind the Foureau-Lamy Saharan Mission (1898–1900)
Samia Henni
7. Claimed, Imagined, Idealized: Survey Photographs from the Northwest Boundary Commission, 1857–1862
Elizabeth Anne Cavaliere
8. Imperial Violence in the Chilean-Argentine Boundary Case of 1902
Matthias Johannes Pfaller Schmid
Part 3: Landscaping: The Cultivation of Environment and Image
9. Annie Lady Brassey’s Photographic Albums and Writings: Botanical Gardens in the Creation of Empire and Place
Nancy Micklewright and Therese O’Malley
10. A Land’s Desire: History, Landscape, and Photography in Ottoman Palestine
Anjuli J. Lebowitz
11. Collective Memory and Landscape: The K.F. Wong Collection in the National Archives of Singapore
Charmaine Toh
Part 4: Sites of Excavation: Unearthing Untold Photographic Histories
12. "Close Your Eyes and Imagine a German": The Alps as a Postmemorial Landscape of Black Europe in Maud Sulter’s Photomontages
Sarah Phillips Casteel
13. Searching for California Hang Trees
Ken Gonzales-Day
Part 5: Practices of Resistance: The Science of Observation
14. The Surveyor’s Gaze: Reconsidering Nineteenth-Century Modalities in Ottoman Visuality
Deniz Türker
15. Witness, Evidence, and the Environmental Archive
Chris Malcolm
16. Terrazo
Pablo López Luz
Epilogue: Land/s
Gohar Dashti
Biography
Sophie Junge is an assistant professor at the Institute of Art History at the University of Zurich.
Erin Hyde Nolan is a visiting assistant professor of art history at Bates College and lecturer at Tufts University.
