Camera Geologica

“A major intervention in the study of materiality, Camera Geologica explains how an understanding of photography’s reliance on mineral extraction can provide fascinating and revelatory insights into the sociopolitical realm of a medium that profoundly shapes people’s sense of their world.” - Rachael Z. DeLue, author of Arthur Dove: Always Connect

“This innovative and exciting study reorients the history of photography to account for the materiality of the medium through its focus on mining and extraction. Siobhan Angus’s geology of photography makes a profound contribution to the history of photography and will be welcomed by labor historians and scholars in the environmental humanities as well.” - Shawn Michelle Smith, author of Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography

“A remarkable achievement. Unfolding across a wonderful selection of well-known and unfamiliar photographic works, Camera Geologica is an original, ingenious, and passionate investigation of photography’s mineral materiality and dependency.” - Christopher Pinney, coeditor of Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination

"Camera Geologica is a thorough investigation of nature's extensive contribution to photography's existence—something that is rarely known about or considered. . . . The book’s message about the human consequences of extraction concerns more than users and makers of photography. Highly recommended for all readers who have any use of, interest in, or connection to photography or with human use of any products derived from the Earth's contents." - C. Chiarenza, Choice

"I’ll say up front that Camera Geologica is excellent and you should read it. It will surprise, alarm, depress, educate and inspire you. As the author states in the opening pages, Camera Geologica belongs in a historical-materialist genealogy, wherein the material world of raw matter, its processing, and its bending into infrastructure, institutions and ideologies explains the power imbalances common among humans." - Christy Wampole, European Review of Books

"A work at the intersection of art history and the environmental humanities, Camera Geologica examines photography from the viewpoint of the mine. It presents readers with a varied set of photographs that are connected to mining in terms of not only their subject matter but also the materials from which they are composed. . . Camera Geologica is helpfully attentive to not only the many things that photographs can tell us but also to information that they cannot possibly reveal." - Joris Mercelis, Technology and Culture

"Camera Geologica is an innovative and pathbreaking book. It should be of significant interest to academic practitioners of visual studies across the board, as well as scholars of photography—especially historians—concerned with the overlapping boundaries of ecology, political economy, and materiality." - Owen Clow, H-Environment

"The book calls for a shift from extractive practices to sustainable relationships, embracing photography’s capacity for reflection and critique and imagining new ways of understanding and addressing the crises of climate, labour, and ecological imbalance." - Marita Ibañez Sandoval, Visual Studies

"Camera Geologica promises and delivers an elemental history of photography that unpacks its material and ideo-logical entanglements to date, so we can better imagine and prepare for a desirable future." - Oriana Confente, Public

"Taken together, the book’s six chapters provide a comprehensive and global portrait of the supply chains, labor processes, and environmental despoliations that are formally and materially refracted through the works of these photographers. In so doing, Camera Geologica redefines what photography might mean in the time of the Anthropocene." - John G. Winn, Media-N