Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography

In Camera Geologica Siobhan Angus tells the history of photography through the minerals upon which the medium depends. Challenging the emphasis on immateriality in discourses on photography, Angus focuses on the inextricable links between image-making and resource extraction, revealing how the mining of bitumen, silver, platinum, iron, uranium, and rare earth elements is a precondition of photography. Photography, Angus contends, begins underground and, in photographs of mines and mining, frequently returns there. Through a materials-driven analysis of visual culture, she illustrates histories of colonization, labor, and environmental degradation to expose the ways in which photography is enmeshed within and enables global extractive capitalism. Angus places nineteenth-century photography in dialogue with digital photography and its own entangled economies of extraction, demonstrating the importance of understanding photography's complicity in the economic, geopolitical, and social systems that order the world.

Author: Siobhan Angus
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 03/22/2024
Pages: 328
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 8.80h x 5.80w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9781478030188

Review Citation(s):
Choice 10/01/2024

About the Author
Siobhan Angus is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University.