Colonialist Photography Imag(in)ing Race and Place

"Colonialist Photography is an absorbing collection of essays and photographs exploring the relationship between photography and Europe and American colonialism. The book is packed with well over a hundred captivating images ranging from the first experiments with photography as a documentary medium up to the decolonization of many regions after World War II.
Reinforcing a broad range of Western assumptions and prejudices, such images often assisted in the construction of a colonial culture. In these thirteen essays, "Colonialist "Photography considers:
- How photographs tended to support the cultural and political rhetoric of racial and geographical difference between the West and its colonies;
- The range of images from "scientific" categorizing and recording methods to "commercial" pictures for collection and display, such as postcards and magazine advertisements;
- How photographers contributed to cultural, social, and political ideas of race by highlighting racial distinction in their work.
By drawing upon methods from anthropology, literary criticism, geography, imperial history, and art history, Hight and Sampson offer a rich source of current ideas about the relationship between colonialism and visual representation. Using case studies and recent forms of interpretive analysis, these post-colonial readings provide a thought-provoking analysis of how we imagine race and place.
Now published for the first time in paperback.

1 Introduction: Photography, “race”, and post-colonial theory 2 Laying ghosts to rest 3 Rewriting the Nubian figure in the photograph: Maxime Du Camp’s “cultural hypochondria” 4 “A pure labor of love”: A publishing history of The People of India 5 Unmasking the colonial picturesque: Samuel Bourne’s photographs of Barrackpore Park 6 Picturing alterity: Representational strategies in Victorian type photographs of Ottoman men 7 The many lives of Beato’s “beauties” 8 Colonial collecting: French women and Algerian cartes postales 9 Photography and the emergence of the Pacific cruise: Rethinking the representational crisis in colonial photography 10 Advertising paradise: Hawai‘i in art, anthropology, and commercial photography 11 Capturing race: Anthropology and photography in German and Austrian prisoner-of-war camps during World War I 12 Germaine Krull and L’Amitié noire: World War II and French colonialist film 13 “A better place to live”: Government agency photography and the transformations of the Puerto Rican Jíbaro

Gary D. Sampson is Associate Professor of art history at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Ohio. His recent publications include chapters on the photography of Samuel Bourne and Lala Deen Dayal in India Through the Lens.Eleanor M. Hight is Associate Professor of art history at the University of New Hampshire, Durham. She is the author of Picturing Modernism: Moholy-Nagy and Photography in Weimar Germany and Jackson Pollock: A Study in Reception.