2026/04/01 by Mark A Cheetham, Mark Cheetham
Arts and Humanities · Health Professions · Social Sciences · #Travel Writing and Literature #Indigenous Studies and Ecology #Arctic and Russian Policy Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/arthis/ulag027
Abstract A paradox attends the frequent imaging of the Arctic by visitors to the region in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. On one hand, the vastness, purported uniformity, and voyagers’ unfamiliarity with the area’s topographies, people, flora, and fauna challenged Western habits of representation. Yet there is a compensatory effort to picture what was less than readily visible. Thinking of such struggles and the plentiful visual records of the region as instances of ‘non-visibility’ — as dynamic hinges between the visible and invisible — presents a new interpretive perspective on nineteenth-century Arctic visual culture.