the impression became widespread that hunting was perhaps not the most indelible marker of masculinity, it was suggested that it required greater courage and masculine prowess to draw up close to big cats and other wild animals, and shoot the camera at close range (pp. 130-32). Susan Sontag has described the camera as a "sublimation of the gun", and Ryan reminds us that the vocabulary of picture-taking - loading', 'aiming', vshooting' - has been largely derived from hunting (p.99). Ryan explores the place of photography in big-game hunting as part of his larger study of what Edward Said called the "imaginative geography" of the British empire and the work done by photography in surveying the land, enumerating and classifying the natives, waging military campaigns, opening the colonies to British explorers, travelers, and traders, and enhancing the pedagogic uses of geography. It was one thing to point out to school children on a map the areas of the world under the Union Jack, but altogether more impressive to provide a photographic record of the vast tentacles of the British empire. Ryan's work is animated by the now-commonplace thesis that colonialism entailed far more than economic gain and military triumph: the colonized had perforce to be represented, as they were conceived to be quite incapable of representing themselves, and nothing was calculated to perform the work of representation better than photography. Enlisted in performing the various tasks of empire and giving imperialism succor, photography expressed and articulated the "ideologies of imperialism" (p. 13). The Victorians, Ryan avers, invested a great deal in photography: not only was the camera a technological marvel, endowing its possessor with an inalienable right (again in Susan Sontag's words) "to collect the world", but it was an instrument of exactitude, absolutely "trustworthy" (pp. 17, 23-24). Ryan's own work is founded on different premises: as he points out, it is imperative to understand how the authority ascribed to photography was constructed, and the manner in which photography creates the very objects it purports to represent. Photographs do not speak for themselves, Ryan states, and he similarly rejects the common-sense distinctions between photography, cartography, painting, and writing (p.19). An early photograph of the "Dark Continent" depicted "a wall of impenetrable, twisted vegetation" (p.38), and similarly photographs of Abyssinia, taken by the British during the Abyssinia Campaign, showed barren landscapes, thereby implying not only that the British were largely conducting a war agains the hostile forces of nature, but that there were no indigenous peoples in harm's way (pp.