CORAL EMPIRE: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity

In the 1920s John Earnest Williamson in the Bahamas and Frank Hurley in Australia produced mass-circulated photographs and films that cast corals as industrious, colonizing creatures, and the undersea as a fantastical territory. Traces how their spectacles yoked the tropics and coral reefs to colonialism, racism, and the human domination of nature. Well illustrated some in color.