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Art + Architectural History: Public Talks with Siobhan Angus

Friday, February 28, 2025 from 11:30 am to 1:00 pm

Event poster

Atmospheric Exposures: Mining the Platinum Print

Inspired by platinum prints’ formal and material links to atmosphere, this talk undertakes an atmospheric reading of photographs. The pictorialists championed the atmospheric aesthetics of platinum prints, but platinum and atmosphere also have a material dimension: platinum became an important substitute for silver-based processes, in part due to silver’s vulnerability to atmospheric pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Beginning in Victorian England before moving to Apartheid South Africa, I follow platinum’s supply chains to show how thinking through atmosphere establishes stakes that are both aesthetic and material. Ultimately, the metal’s promise of stable boundaries is undermined by the dust and particles that atmosphere carries between bodies and landscapes.

Siobhan Angus

Siobhan Angus works at the intersections of art history, media studies, and the environmental humanities. Her current research explores the visual culture of resource extraction with a focus on materiality, labor, and environmental justice. Angus is an assistant professor of Media Studies at Carleton University. She is the author of Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke University Press 2024) which was awarded the 2024 Photography Network Book Prize and her research has been published in Environmental Humanities, liquid blackness, and October. 

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