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Siobhan Angus, Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography

Chiara Salari
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Siobhan Angus, Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography. Durham: Duke University Press, 2024, 313 p., ISBN 9781478030188; $28.95.

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1A 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 it is the miner extracting silver, the factory worker producing film stock, or the digital laborer maintaining data servers, photography is embedded in complex circuits of work and value. Angus critiques the way photographic history often overlooks the human and non-human labor that sustains it.

3Photography’s desire to transcend its material origins parallels hidden extraction processes. Despite the centrality of mining to economies, extractive capitalism functions by making industrial production largely invisible: it shifts attention to the commodity, not the labor or materials that make it (7). As Rob Nixon points out, capitalism has a propensity “to abstract in order to extract” (9), and Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel remind us that extraction and abstraction come from the same Latin root, trahere (to drag, to draw out). A form of abstraction can be found in both extractive capitalism and in the photograph, “which separates processes that are part of interconnected systems while enacting a universalization that obscures historical and cultural specificity” (Angus 57-58). Camera Geologica demonstrates how photography is not just about images, but also about the often-invisible infrastructures and physical substrates that make image-making possible, considering “the ‘crude and material’ alongside the ‘fine and spiritual’” (21).

4Approaching photographs as both objects and images—thinking materially beside representation and the aesthetic power of the image—provides new insights into the history of photography and environmental change. Angus examines how cultural forms of extraction shape ways of seeing nature, and function to naturalize and thus facilitate extraction. She also refers to Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concept of “Anthropocene visuality,” a way of seeing that obscures rather than reveals environmental and social injustices, and which is rooted in an understanding of the human relationship with nature as a conquest. Extraction is considered as both a material process and a worldview (Angus 10). Images of mining sites, railroads, and smelting plants did more than document—they “naturalized” extractive landscapes, rendering them as inevitable, progressive, or sublime. Photography, in this context, functioned as both a representational and an ideological tool. It framed extraction as a national or civilizational project, while obscuring the Indigenous displacement and ecological destruction it entailed.

5Indeed, the book starts with a description of the photograph Malakoff Diggins (1871) by Carleton Watkins, hired by the North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company to document a hydraulic mining operation in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, in order to raise capital investment. Encouraging further extraction is the intended function of the image, and the foundational act of violence that made hydraulic blasting possible was the expropriation of Indigenous land, as the Sierra Nevada region is the traditional territory of the Nisenan people. Angus points out that: “[t]he formal beauty of the image renders the violence of blasting quietly aesthetic, sustaining a fantasy of nature and industry held in balance because the more damaging impacts of blasting are illegible within the photographic frame” (2). Making visible what Karl Marx called a “metabolic rift”—a fracture between the natural world and the human society that grew out of it, driven by the perpetually accelerating growth imperatives of capitalism—Watkins’s photograph also gestures to the materiality of the print itself, as metals used in photography (silver, gold, and mercury) were mined in Malakoff Diggins.

6Mined materials are the organizing structure of the book: each chapter centers on the extractive, material, and visual history of one metal or fossil fuel used in photographic processes, ranging from their discovery to the present. Angus builds each body chapter, as well as the introduction, around close readings of various photographs, moving fluidly between rich, case-specific analyses, historical contextualization, and theoretical reflection.

7Chapter 1, “Bitumen and a Reorientation of Vision,” begins with the light-sensitive material used in the first photograph taken by Nicephore Niepce in 1826. Taking as a case study Warren Cariou’s petrographs of the Athabasca tar sands in Western Canada, the chapter considers the complex interplay between time, fossils, sun exposure, and labor that bitumen introduces. Angus situates Cariou’s very material photographs within the invisibilized visual culture of oil, and examines them alongside work by T&ēmā, Edward Burtynsky, and Allan Sekula. Cariou’s petrographs bring into view the complex networks of settler colonialism, petrocapitalism, and consumption that make the image possible while proposing other ways of seeing human relations with territory.

8Chapter 2, “Silver and Scale,” focuses on the most important material used in analog photography. Silver’s remarkable light sensitivity, relatively low cost, and ubiquity enabled the rise of photography as an industry. Tracing a long historical arc, moving from the fifteenth-century discovery of silver in Potosi (now Bolivia) to Timothy O’Sullivan’s photographs of silver at Comstock Lode, Nevada, in the 1860s, the chapter concludes with the Eastman Kodak Company and the rise of photography as a mass medium. Angus critiques the tendency to romanticize silver in aesthetic discourses—especially within notions of the “photographic sublime”—and argues that such framings obscure the exploitative labor and environmental devastation that accompany silver mining. Archival mining photographs show workers, yet seldom engage with their conditions. Conversely, company reports and promotional images erase labor altogether, focusing on machines, landscapes, or managerial perspectives. Photography becomes a medium through which labor is both recorded and erased. Moreover, photography not only recorded colonial modernity but was materially constituted by it. This elemental entanglement makes the medium complicit in the extractive logic it sometimes purports to critique.

9Chapter 3, “Platinum and Atmosphere,” turns to the most luxurious material in analog photography. The pictorialists championed the atmospheric aesthetics of platinum prints, but platinum and atmosphere also have a material dimension: platinum prints were a chemically stable alternative to silver prints, which were vulnerable to growing industrial air pollution. Tracing platinum’s supply chains to South Africa, Angus does an atmospheric reading of platinum prints by David Goldblatt and Simon Starling to show how the metal’s promise of stable boundaries is undermined by the dust and particles that atmosphere carries between bodies and landscapes. She concludes with Larry McNeil’s exploration of coal mining and atmosphere in the western United States “to contrast the futurity promised by the stability of the platinum print with the reality that polluted atmosphere is foreclosing collective futures on this planet” (Angus 26).

10Chapter 4, “Iron and Unstable Boundaries,” centers on cyanotypes, or blueprint photography. Reading Anna Atkins’s cyanotypes of algae and ferns through Walter Benjamin’s writing on the links between iron, metabolism, and industry reveals the connections between the print, the plant, plantation slavery, and industrial growth. Angus then turns to railroad photography in Pennsylvania’s Steel Belt during the Second Industrial Revolution to consider the rise of blueprint photography, contrasting blueprints with William Rau’s albumen prints. The chapter concludes with LaToya Ruby Frazier’s cyanotypes, which explore embodied histories of deindustrialization in the Rust Belt. Throughout, the author shows “how iron as a material moves between registers—the plant, the body, and infrastructure—enabling both biological and industrial growth alongside differentially distributed costs to sacrificed life” (27).

11Chapter 5, “Uranium and Photography beyond Vision,” toggles between the material realities of extraction and the more spectacular imaginaries of atomic culture, centering on the problem of “slow violence,” as described by Nixon. First, experiments by Niepce de Saint-Victor, Wilhelm Rontgen, and Henri Becquerel show that photography is central to the development of atomic culture—just as many of the qualities of radiation were first perceived on photographic paper. Photography was deliberately used to direct attention from the violence caused by the atomic bomb to the spectacular imaginary of the bomb itself. At the same time, photographs made with uranium can make visible forms of attritional violence that otherwise cannot be seen. Materially, uranium highlights the limits and possibilities of seeing and visibility in the context of violence, both slow and spectacular. Angus’s analysis of uranium mining in Indigenous lands—particularly in Canada—exposes the racialized violence of nuclear extraction. Photography, in this context, serves both as a recorder of radioactive landscapes and as a means of obscuring the very dangers it documents. This paradox is central to Angus’s critique: the camera sees and unsees, reveals and conceals.

12The last chapter, titled “Rare Earth Elements and De/Materialization,” turns to the digital world to consider the extractive and visual image economies of the present. It focuses on rare earth elements, “seventeen chemically similar minerals that make technologies brighter, faster, and lighter” (Angus 27). Rare earths serve as our guide to digital images because they are used in lenses and screens and to create color. Following rare earths from their extraction in Baotou, Mongolia, through the very material infrastructure of the Cloud, which runs through cables deep under the ocean, to Agbogbloshie, an e-waste dump in Accra, Ghana, highlights the environmental and labor costs of seemingly immaterial images. Indeed, Angus powerfully dismantles the myth of the “immaterial” digital image by tracing the planetary costs of screen technologies and cloud storage devices that rely on a global supply chain rooted in ecological devastation and exploitative labor, particularly in the Global South. The chapter ends with a reflection on ecological aesthetics and the need for alternative visual practices that resist the extractive gaze:

I consider the possibilities of ethical spectatorship in the image-saturated present. In emphasizing the materiality of the digital image, I push back against narratives that the digital is less material and, by extension, necessarily less environmentally damaging. The conceptual shift from a material object to dematerial representation, from the dark room to Lightroom, from the archive to the Cloud, symbolically neutralizes the ongoing violence of extraction, hiding the environmental and human costs undergirding the digital photograph. (Angus 199)

13Advocating for a way of seeing and producing images that is aware of their material costs and social histories, Angus points to contemporary photographic projects which make “extraction visible,” visualizing toxicity, labor, and land relations, in the belief that photography’s implication in damaging systems makes it a productive site to initiate critique. Moreover, she considers photographs as “a powerful means to illuminate ecological catastrophe in the present and to conceptualize how to redress such harm for the future” (4). Throughout, Camera Geologica exposes photography’s ambivalence, as the medium can serve as a tool of both power and resistance. Photography is enmeshed within and often reinforces structures of power that are premised upon the dispossession of peoples and the extraction of resources and labor, but it can also enable “new possibilities of political action and forming new conditions for its visibility” (Azoulay 24). For instance, photography was used both to legitimize extractive industries (through glossy company reports and state-sponsored documentation) and to critique them (through labor activism and environmental campaigns), making visible what extractive capitalism renders invisible. Angus concludes that, “[d]espite its historic and material complicities, photography can challenge extraction as a worldview” (18).

14Admitting there is no guarantee that environmentally activist photographs result in empathy or action, because, in many cases, they may aestheticize or anesthetize (Demos, 2019), Angus nonetheless believes in art’s power to encourage the spectator toward transformation by developing a consciousness of the contradictions of life under capitalism and generating a critical attitude toward the scene (25). We must, as Donna Haraway proposes, “stay with the trouble,” as recognizing the patterns and values that underlie our relationship with the natural world is the first step to transforming our relations (Angus 229). Moreover, while criticisms of photography’s political potential have focused on its transhistoricizing tendency, on the way the medium removes a scene from its social and political context (Benjamin, Brecht, Sekula), and more recently its political economy (Coleman and James; Burbridge; Huerta), Angus suggests that in photography’s ability to isolate a single moment for reflection, there might be a lesson for our present: “In a sense, photographs resist acceleration by freezing time, by slowing it down. They can, potentially, give us pause. In photographs, there is an opportunity for a kind of slow looking that can initiate ethical spectatorship” (218).

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Bibliographie

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Szeman, Imre, and Jennifer Wenzel. “What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Extractivism?” Textual Practice, vol. 35, no. 3, 2021, p. 505–523.

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Chiara Salari, « Siobhan Angus, Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography »Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/27728 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15i34

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Chiara Salari

Sapienza Université de Rome

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