Coral Empire

Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity

Ann Elias (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

296 Seiten

2019
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4780-0318-2 (ISBN)

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From vividly colored underwater photographs of Australia's Great Barrier Reef to life-size dioramas re-creating coral reefs and the bounty of life they sustained, the work of early twentieth-century explorers and photographers fed the public's fascination with reefs. In the 1920s John Ernest Williamson in the Bahamas and Frank Hurley in Australia produced mass-circulated and often highly staged photographs and films that cast corals as industrious, colonizing creatures, and the undersea as a virgin, unexplored, and fantastical territory. In Coral Empire Ann Elias traces the visual and social history of Williamson and Hurley and how their modern media spectacles yoked the tropics and coral reefs to colonialism, racism, and the human domination of nature. Using the labor and knowledge of indigenous peoples while exoticizing and racializing them as inferior Others, Williamson and Hurley sustained colonial fantasies about people of color and the environment as endless resources to be plundered. As Elias demonstrates, their reckless treatment of the sea prefigured attitudes that caused the environmental crises that the oceans and reefs now face.

Ann Elias is Associate Professor of the History and Theory of Contemporary Global Art at the University of Sydney, author of Camouflage Australia: Art, Nature, Science, and War and Useless Beauty: Flowers and Australian Art, and coeditor of Camouflage Cultures: Beyond the Art of Disappearance.

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part I. The Coral Uncanny
1. Coral Empire 15
2. Mad Love 29
Part II. John Ernest Williamson and the Bahamas
3. Williamson and the Photosphere 49
4. The Field Museum-Williamson Undersea Expedition 68
5. Under the Sea 83
6. Williamson in Australia 97
Part III. Frank Hurley and the Great Barrier Reef
7. Hurley and the Floor of the Sea 117
8. Hurley and the Australian Museum Expedition 131
9. Pearls and Savages 147
10. Hurley and the Torres Strait Diver 165
Part IV. Hurley and Williamson
11. Explorers and Modern Media 185
12. Color and Tourism 199
Part V. The Great Acceleration
13. The Anthropocene 217
Conclusion 230
Notes 235
Bibliography 261
Index 277

Erscheinungsdatum	25.03.2019
Zusatzinfo	16 page color insert
Verlagsort	North Carolina
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	567 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Fotokunst
	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik ► Natur / Ökologie
	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik ► Naturführer
	Naturwissenschaften ► Geowissenschaften ► Geologie
	Naturwissenschaften ► Geowissenschaften ► Hydrologie / Ozeanografie
ISBN-10	1-4780-0318-9 / 1478003189
ISBN-13	978-1-4780-0318-2 / 9781478003182
Zustand	Neuware