Survey Practices and Landscape Photography Across the Globe

Book excerpt: 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.