An Elemental History of Photography
Siobhan Angus (Professor of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University, Ottawa) will discuss her book "Camera Geologica" (Duke Univ. Press, 2024).
Please join us for a lecture by Prof. Siobhan Angus, Professor of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University, Ottawa. Prof. Angus will be discussing her recent book "Camera Geologica" (Duke Univ. Press, 2024). This event is organized by the Anthropocene Working Group, sponsored by the Leslie Center for the Humanities.
About the book: "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."
Thursday, November 6th, 4:30-5:45pm
Rockefeller Center 003
