Author Meets Readers | Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography – Canceled
Thursday, March 27, 2025 from 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
- In-person event
- Irene’s Pub Restaurant , Ottawa , ON , K1S 3W4
Please note this scheduled event has been cancelled.
About the Book
In Camera Geologica Siobhan Angus tells the history of photography through the minerals upon which the medium depends. Challenging the emphasis on immateriality in discourses on photography, Angus focuses on the inextricable links between image-making and resource extraction, revealing how the mining of bitumen, silver, platinum, iron, uranium, and rare earth elements is a precondition of photography. Photography, Angus contends, begins underground and, in photographs of mines and mining, frequently returns there. Through a materials-driven analysis of visual culture, she illustrates histories of colonization, labor, and environmental degradation to expose the ways in which photography is enmeshed within and enables global extractive capitalism. Angus places nineteenth-century photography in dialogue with digital photography and its own entangled economies of extraction, demonstrating the importance of understanding photography’s complicity in the economic, geopolitical, and social systems that order the world.
About the Author
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 the award-winning Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke University Press 2024), and her research has been published in Environmental Humanities, Liquid Blackness, and October.