"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.

Colonialist Photography is an absorbing collection of essays and photographs exploring the relationship between photography and European and American colonialism. Packed with over a hundred images, these captivating pictures range from the first experiments with photography as a documentary medium, up to the decolonisation of many regions after the Second World War.
With thirteen essays, Colonialist Photography considers:
* how photographs tended to support the cultural and political rhetoric of racial and geographic 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.

Capturing Japan in Nineteenth-Century New England Photography Collections examines the evidence left behind from a famous first encounter-that of prominent New England Americans with the remnants of feudal Japan in the 1870s and 1880s. The study reveals that, despite these Americans' varied reasons for traveling to Japan and studying its culture, a common desire united all of their collecting activities: to gather photographic documentation of a Japan they believed was disappearing under the pressures of trade and industrialization. Eleanor Hight focuses on the case studies of six New Englanders, whose travel and photograph collecting influenced the flowering of Japonism in the late nineteenth-century Boston area-still visible today in institutions such as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The book also explores the history of Japanese photography and its main themes, from images of travel and historic sites, to exotic subjects such as geisha and samurai. The first history of its kind, this study makes fundamental points about the ways photographs, seeming conveyors of fact, imprint mental images and suppositions on their viewers.