Camera Geologica
An Elemental History of Photography
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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.
About this Author
Siobhan Angus is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University.
Reviews
"Camera Geologica is a thorough investigation of nature's extensive contribution to photography's existence--something that is rarely known about or considered. . . . The book's message about the human consequences of extraction concerns more than users and makers of photography. Highly recommended for all readers who have any use of, interest in, or connection to photography or with human use of any products derived from the Earth's contents."
"I'll say up front that Camera Geologica is excellent and you should read it. It will surprise, alarm, depress, educate and inspire you. As the author states in the opening pages, Camera Geologica belongs in a historical-materialist genealogy, wherein the material world of raw matter, its processing, and its bending into infrastructure, institutions and ideologies explains the power imbalances common among humans."
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