James R Ryan

When Ferdinand Magellan set out to circumnavigate the globe in 1519, he wasn’t able to take 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 was integral to exploration and used by explorers, sponsors and publishers alike, and in 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. Richly illustrated, Photography and Exploration shines new light on how photography has shaped the image of explorers, expeditions and the worlds they discovered.

For many the dawn of the twentieth century ushered in an era where the world map had few if any blank spaces left to discover. The age of exploration was supposedly dead. "New Spaces of Exploration" challenges this assumption. Focusing specifically on exploration in the twentieth century, the authors demonstrate how new technologies and changing geopolitical configurations have ensured that exploration has remained a key feature of our rapidly globalizing world. Ranging widely in their geographical focus - from the Europe and Asia to Australia, and from the polar regions to outer space - they demonstrate the increasing diversity of modern exploration and reveal the continuing political, military, industrial and cultural motivations at play. The result is a major contribution to our understanding of the significance of exploration in the twentieth century. Contributors include: E. Baigent, C. Collis, K. Dodds, F. Driver, M. Godwin, J. Hill, F. Korsmo, F. MacDonald, S. Naylor, J. Ryan, N. Thomas, and K. Yusoff.

The advent of photography opened up new worlds to 19th century viewers, who were able to visualize themselves and the world beyond in unprecedented detail. But the emphasis on the photography's objectivity masked the subjectivity inherent in deciding what to record, from what angle and when. This text examines this inherent subjectivity. Drawing on photographs that come from personal albums, corporate archives, commercial photographers, government reports and which were produced as art, as record, as data, the work shows how the photography shaped and was shaped by geographical concerns.

"While the cultural history of the British Empire has recently attracted much interest, relatively little attention has been paid to the significance of its visualization. Yet the Empire was pictured across a wide spectrum of imagery, from paintings to postcards, maps to documents. Focusing on the role of photography, this wide-ranging book explores the aesthetics of empire.

The development of photography in the Victorian era coincided with the dramatic expansion of the British Empire. Photography assisted in the exploration, surveying and mapping of territory and the representation of imperial landscapes. To audiences hungry for glimpses of a rapidly expanding world, photographs seemed to capture distant realities, rendering them accessible. And while administrators and anthropologists used photography to picture 'racial types', soldiers and hunters armed themselves with cameras in order to capture photographic 'trophies' of natives and animals.

Drawing on a broad range of visual imagery, including many previously unpublished photographs, this book shows how photographic practices and aesthetics can express and articulate the ideologies of imperialism."

Introduces undergraduates to the key debates regarding space and culture and the key theoretical arguments which guide cultural geographical work. This book addresses the impact, significance, and characteristics of the 'cultural turn' in contemporary geography. It focuses on the development of the cultural geography subdiscipline and on what has made it a peculiar and unique realm of study. It demonstrates the importance of culture in the development of debates in other subdisciplines within geography and beyond. In line with these previous themes, the significance of space in the production of cultural values and expressions is also developed. Along with its timely examination of the health of the cultural geographical subdiscipline, this book is to be valued for its analysis of the impact of cultural theory on studies elsewhere in geography and of ideas of space and spatiality elsewhere in the social sciences.