WEST PALM BEACH, FL.- The 19th-century drive to explore and document the growing territories of the United States saw an unprecedented use of photography as the means of recording vast unexplored lands. Yet, though it was ceded to the federal government in 1821, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that the vast wetlands system of the Everglades was systematically imaged. Imaging Eden: Photographers Discover the Everglades (Daylight, Spring 2015) presents an overview of the pictures and personalities that have formed our understanding of one of the most contested and special environments on the planet. The book is accompanied by an exhibition of the same title organized by Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida on view through July 12, 2015.

Tim B. Wride, William and Sarah Ross Soter Curator of Photography at Norton, contributes a text that presents an overview of the role that photography has played in the construction of the myth and the reality of the Everglades. He writes: "The medium has alternately been silent witness, premeditated booster, relentless critic, and passionate advocate of this unique environment."

Wride's text is illustrated by vernacular images culled from the picture albums of pioneering families that settled there, as well as works by such well-known photographers as Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Eliot Porter, James Balog, and Clyde Butcher.

The 19th and early 20th century images provide a framework to contextualize the work of four contemporary photographers who were commissioned to discover the Everglades on their own terms and from their own perspectives. They are:

Korean-born artist Jungjin Lee is known for her meticulously rendered reductive land and waterscapes as well as an approach that is both intuitive and elegant. She is drawn to subjects that carry a physical as well as a psychic potency. She has remarked that her experience of photographing in the Everglades required her "to see differently ... from above as if a bird, and from below as if a snake."

For more than two decades, Amsterdam-based artist Bert Teunissen has been making portraits of Europeans posed in their domestic spaces bathed in natural light. Carrying this strategy into the Everglades, Teunissen has made images of people in their domestic environments, from Okeechobee to Everglades City, as well as a visual record of his journeys in south Florida and the impressions he could record from his rented car. His work conveys an experience of both diaristic and anthropological significance.

New Jersey based Gerald Slota's imagery is achieved through a complex accumulation of photography, collage, drawing and painting. Drawing inspiration from early renaissance as well as 17th and 18th history paintings, he has produced a single, monumental, narrative panorama that conjures the conflated 19th century histories of the second and third Seminole wars that were fought in an attempt to purge southern Florida of the native and runaway slave populations who had sought refuge there.

The goal of Magnum photographer Jim Goldberg and curator-educator Jordan Stein was "simply to get lost in the experience." The resulting installation of their work juxtaposes a catalog of residents from the southern reaches of the Everglades with surveillance videos of local wildlife.

Tim B. Wride's publications include Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography after the Revolution (2001), Scene of the Crime: Photographs from the LAPD Archive (2004), and Pirkle Jones: California Photographs, 1935-1982 (2001).

Scott Eyman, who writes the book's introduction, is the former book editor and art critic of The Palm Beach Post. He is a frequent book reviewer for The Wall Street Journal, and his most recent book is John Wayne: The Life and Legend (2014).