ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Ariella Azoulay's concept of imperial violence, which she describes as the “entire enterprise of destroying the existing worlds of signs, activities, and social fabrics and replacing them with a ‘new world’ of objects, classification, laws, technologies, and meanings.” It explores several ways in which photographs were weaponized in the service of national and imperial power as well as for the purposes of geographic expansion. In 1900, the Argentine Boundary Commission submitted an extensively illustrated, four-volume argument to the arbiters in London. A very wide panorama of a rough and deserted landscape with one person standing on the land. The surveys prepared the annexation of Patagonia and provided unlimited access to scientists and photographers to transform this land in measures and dimensions proper to the new imperial powers of Argentina and Chile.
