Book Talk: Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography

Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography with Siobhan Angus in conversation with Kevin Coleman and Mark Cheetham

WHEN: 27 March 2024 – 5:30-7:00pm EST
WHERE: University of Toronto, Sidney Smith 2098

In Camera Geologica (Duke University Press, 2024) 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.

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

Duke University Press - Camera Geologica (dukeupress.edu)

Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: March 2024
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3018-8 / Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4780-2593-1 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-5917-2
Available at Duke University Press, Amazon Kindle, Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble nook, Google Play