4e de couverture : This book investigates the historical practice of producing stereotyped spectacles of colonized peoples at the great exhibitions and in colonial photography, and relates it to the shaping of European and settler identities. In doing so, it singles out the homogeneous aspects of colonialism's culture as well as distinguishing its discontinuities. By comparing the images produced in Britain and France with those produced in North America, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific, Japan, and China, it proposes that differences in representations of colonized peoples between the imperial centres and the colonies were the result of different social and political agendas. By focusing on the images connected to anthropology, dying race theory, travel, tourism, and portraiture, Maxwell argues that while some photographs were directed at naturalizing the precept of colonialism, others were used to criticize it and to empower indigenous subjects. Written from a postcolonial perspective, and pursuing an interdisciplinary approach, this book will be of interest to scholars, students, and researchers intent on knowing more about the images of racial and cultural difference that shaped our immediate past.

This volume considers the meaning and power of images in African history and culture. It assembles a wide-ranging collection of essays dealing with specific visual forms, including monuments cinema, cartoons, domestic and professional photography, body art, world fairs, and museum exhibits.

The late nineteenth century saw a rapid increase in colonial conflicts throughout the French and British empires. It was also the period in which the camera began to be widely available. Colonial authorities were quick to recognise the power of this new technology, which they used to humiliate defeated opponents and to project an image of supremacy across the world. Drawing on a wealth of visual materials, from soldiers’ personal albums to the collections of press agencies and government archives, this book offers a new account of how conflict photography developed in the decades leading up to the First World War. It explores the various ways in which the camera was used to impose order on subject populations in Africa and Asia and to generate propaganda for the public in Europe, where a visual economy of violence was rapidly taking shape. At the same time, it reveals how photographs could escape the intentions of their creators, offering a means for colonial subjects to push back against oppression.

Publisher Description

The Middle East played a critical role in the development of photography as a new technology and an art form. Likewise, photography was instrumental in cultivating and maintaining Europe’s distinctively Orientalist vision of the Middle East. As new advances enhanced the versatility of the medium, nineteenth-century photographers were able to mass-produce images to incite and satisfy the demands of the region’s burgeoning tourist industry and the appetites of armchair travelers in Europe. In this way, the evolution of modern photography fueled an interest in visual contact with the rest of the world. Photography’s Orientalism offers the first in-depth cultural study of the works of European and non- European photographers active in the Middle East and India, focusing on the relationship between photographic, literary, and historical representations of this region and beyond. The essays explore the relationship between art and politics by considering the connection between the European presence there and aesthetic representations produced by traveling and resident photographers, thereby contributing to how the history of photography is understood.