The contrast between the temperate and the tropical is one of the most enduring themes in the history of the Western geographical imagination. Caught between the demands of experience and representation, documentation and fantasy, travelers in the tropics have often treated tropical nature as a foil to the temperate, to all that is civilized, modest, and enlightened. "Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire" explores images of the tropical world maps, paintings, botanical drawings, photographs, diagrams, and texts produced by European and American travelers over the past three centuries....

Photography and documentary film in the making of modern Brazil investigates the Brazilian image world in the first four decades of the twentieth century, an era of significant economic, political, and cultural change. Examining a constellation of still and moving images produced across the Brazilian territory by filmmakers, explorers, anthropologists, intellectuals and missionaries of various kinds, including Claude Levi-Strauss, Mario de Andrade, Silvino Santos and Aloha Baker, the book maps the relationships between visual culture, nation-building, colonialism and global modernity.
In...