ICS Seminar Series

Abstract Mare incognita, or unknown seas, was the oceanic parallel of Terra incognita, the term that Europeans used to identify lands not yet explored and mastered; spaces largely unknown to Europeans yet intimately known by animals, plants, and non-European maritime and Indigenous peoples. This paper is about the will of European explorers in the early twentieth century to transform the tropical underwater of coral reef oceans in the British colonies of Australia and the Bahamas from spaces of assumed alien-ness and mystery to technology-driven spectacles mediated and mastered by cameras. It was an optimistic time to be an explorer and photographer of the underwater, but the will to control the environment of the tropical underwater was also the start of the destruction of the world’s coral reefs through human impact driven by the illusion of mastery over “nature”. Biography Ann Elias is Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Sydney and a Key Researcher with the Sydney Environment Institute. Research interests include camouflage as a military, social and aesthetic phenomenon; flowers and their cultural history; coral reef imagery of the underwater realm. Books include Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity (2019).