Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

When Ferdinand Magellan set out to circumnavigate the globe in 1519, he wasn't able to bring a digital camera or a smartphone with him. Yet, as the eagerly awaited images from the Mars rover prove, modern exploration is inconceivable without photography. Since its invention in 1839, photography has been integral to exploration, used by explorers, sponsors, and publishers alike, and the early twentieth century, advances in technology--and photography's newfound cultural currency as a truthful witness to the world--made the camera an indispensable tool. In Photography and Exploration , James R. Ryan uses a variety of examples, from polar journeys to space missions, to show how exploration photographs have been created, circulated, and consumed as objects of both scientific research and art. Examining a wide range of photographs and expeditions, Ryan considers how nations have often employed images as a means to scientific advancement or territorial conquest. He 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--especially by the West. These images also challenge the way audiences perceive the world and their place within it. Featuring one hundred images, Photography and Exploration shines new light on how photography has shaped the image of explorers, expeditions, and the worlds they discovered.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Ryan (Univ. of Exeter, UK) investigates mid-19th through early-21st-century photography by European and American explorers. Following a brief history of travel photography, he discusses early state-sponsored scientific photography, survey photography, early-20th-century explorations of the North and South Poles, and space and underwater images. He emphasizes three themes: how photographs were made and in what context, form and aesthetics, and reception and circulation. This book demonstrates how, besides their avowed purpose, scientific photographs serve as symbolic carriers of other narratives, national and imperial power, and manly force conquering nature through traits of endurance, knowledge, and control. After surveying major expeditions (chapter 1) and the sublime and picturesque (chapter 2), Ryan addresses the typical absence of indigenous populations in most survey images. Inclusion of local people complicated Western ideas about discovery and shaped Western ideas about the "other" and the "exotic." Nineteenth-century photography of indigenous people tended toward the ethnographic documentation of "vanishing races." By the early 20th century, more local people appeared both as subjects and as photographers. Finally, Ryan discusses how images could be arranged in presentations to carry different messages. As he indicates, this book is intended to launch further investigation into a little-studied area of photography. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers. S. Spencer North Carolina State University