Postcolonialist theory revisits and reframes European expectations of knowledge, authority, and visibility in representations of the colonial encounter. Photography played an important role in the formation of these expectations, one discussed in modern histories of the medium. While differing in their objectives and academic disciplines, James Ryan and Christopher Pinney both use postcolonial theory to rewrite narratives of Euro-American photographic history. Pinney’s book, in particular, makes a compelling case for the questions the present poses for the study of photographs of the colonialist past. James Ryan’s Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire is a survey focusing on photography as one of the cultural practices that sustained British colonial expansion and economic imperialism. Examining the period between the invention of the medium and the first decades of the twentieth century, Ryan studies photography’s place amidst the variety of cultural texts that constructed the British Empire in the Victorian imagination. He evaluates photographic discourse as intertextual, i.e., seen and read in interplay with linguistic messages and other symbolic codes. Ryan specifically examines the role of photography as a form of geographical discourse, implicated in the contemporary development of a geographical science, “which took as its raison d’etre the...