Atmospheric Regulation in the Panorama

The introduction begins with an exploration of Carleton Watkins’s photographs of mining to establish the material links between photography and mining. Working from the premise that the mine is a precondition for photography, the chapter considers how photography reinforces and challenges extraction before analyzing photography through an ecological lens. Finally, it turns to questions of materials and materiality. Methodologically, this chapter situates photography as an ecotone, an environmental term for a zone of tension, arguing that photography’s overlapping spheres of influence and unstable boundaries make it a fruitful site for ecological thought. The theoretical framework situates cultural production in an ecocritical framework, revealing an interplay between materials, extractive and artistic labor, and histories.

Introduction

2024

Bitumen and a Reorientation of Vision

2024

What new histories surface when photography begins underground? Chapter 1 turns to bitumen, the light-sensitive material in the first photograph taken by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826. Taking as a case study Warren Cariou’s petrographs of the Athabasca tar sands in western Canada, the chapter proposes a shift in focus from light to minerals, considering the complex interplay between time, fossils, solarity, and labor that bitumen introduces. It situates Cariou’s very material photographs within the hidden-in-plain-sight visual culture of oil, reading Cariou alongside works by Ts?m?, Edward Burtynsky, and Allan Sekula. Crucially, Cariou’s petrographs move toward a land-based photography, bringing 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. In doing so, Cariou makes a case for photography as a critical site of antiextractive world-making.

Silver and Scale

2024

Chapter 2 turns to silver, 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. Engaging Marx’s “Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” and focusing on scale, this chapter traces a long historical arc, moving from the fifteenth century discovery of silver in Potosí, (now Bolivia) to Timothy O’Sullivan’s photographs of silver at Comstock Lode, Nevada, in the 1860s, concluding with Eastman Kodak Company and the rise of photography as a mass medium. In the process, we see how socially contested changes in currency standards, industrial uses, and recycling impacted the supply of silver that could then be conscripted into the scaled-up production required for Kodak to become a household name.