ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up how landscape imagery is inextricably bound to the world of human politics and culture, including struggles over national borders, climate and ecological challenges, and history. As historian Finis Dunaway explains, “nature is an important actor in human history. Santu Mofokeng’s photograph does not overtly reference this history, and none of the photographs from his Chasing Shadows series show the degrading living conditions that were and still remain a part of apartheid’s legacy. Photography’s relationship to the formation and experience of national borders and territorial expansion has a long history that predates any twentieth- or twenty-first century concern. In the nineteenth century, just decades after photography’s “invention,” the British and French deployed photographers to their colonies and throughout the world as a way to mark space and claim ownership over lands and people.
