Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: A landmark contribution to the materialistic turn in the history and theory of photography, Camera Geologica also crucially participates, through its ecocritical approach, in the environmental humanities' increasing focus on the relationship between capitalism and climate change, and issues of environmental justice.With a compelling interdisciplinary scope-drawing from art history, visual culture studies, media theory, Indigenous studies, and political ecology-Siobhan Angus proposes an "elemental history" of photography by tracing how key geological materials have not only shaped the technological development of photography, but also implicated the medium in colonial, industrial, and environmental violence.The book begins with the premise that "min[ing] is a necessary precondition for photography as a medium" (5), to reveal the material and social connection between photography and extractive capitalism. 2A focus on mining enacts a reorientation of vision that directs our attention underground.Literally meaning "written with light," photography has long been invested in appearing immaterial: an emphasis on light and a desire to transcend the material realities of the medium runs throughout photographic discourse.For instance, in his article on the stereoscope, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that "Form is henceforth divorced from matter" (8), expressing photography's aspiration to transparency, and promise of an unmediated, pure vision, unchained from the earthly work of production and reproduction.Camera Geologica shifts the focus from light to metals to consider the histories of labor and environment that underpin the photographic object (4).Whether
Source: Transatlantica
DOI: 10.4000/15i34
Author: Chiara Salari
Institution: Sapienza University of Rome
Language: English
Topic: Photographic and Visual Arts
Subfield: Museology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7124134298