Siobhan Angus: Photography from the Deep: Image-Making and Resource Extraction

Challenging the emphasis on immateriality in discourses on photography, this talk focuses on the inextricable links between image-making and resource extraction, revealing how mining is a precondition of photography. Photography begins underground and, in photographs of mines and mining, frequently returns there. Through a materials-driven analysis of visual culture, I illustrate histories of colonization, labor, and environmental degradation to explore the ways in which photography is enmeshed within and enables global extractive capitalism. Reading materiality alongside representation and visual form reveals a complex picture of photography’s implication within extractive capitalism and, in turn, its potential to resist it.

Siobhan Angus works at the intersections of art history, media studies, and the environmental humanities. She is an assistant professor of media studies at Carleton University and holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Visual Culture from York University where her dissertation was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal. Prior to joining Carleton, Angus was the Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. She is the author of Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography, (Duke University Press 2024) and her research has been published in Environmental Humanities, Capitalism and the Camera (Verso, 2021) and October. At the heart of her research program lies an intellectual and political commitment to environmental, economic, and social justice.