Camera geologica : an elemental history of photography / Siobhan Angus.

Main entry:

Angus, Siobhan, author.

Title & Author:

Camera geologica : an elemental history of photography / Siobhan Angus.

Publication:

Durham [North Carolina] : Duke University Press, 2024.
©2024

Description:

xiv, 313 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 23 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-292) and index.
Bitumen and a Reorientation of Vision -- Silver and Scale -- Platinum and Atmosphere -- Iron and Unstable Boundaries -- Uranium and Photography beyond Vision -- Rare Earth Elements and De/Materialization -- All That Is Solid Melts into Air.

Summary:

"Camera Geologica considers photography from the perspective of the rare earth materials it has historically required, specifically bitumen, silver, platinum, iron, uranium, and others. The book marks a shift from the study of photography's focus on light or paper to metals, which open a way of thinking about the histories of labor and the environment than underpin the photographic object. Siobhan Angus employs a historical materialist approach to think about how the use of earthly materials are bound up in questions about labor, empire, colonization, and the environment. Angus demonstrates how photographic materials can be unique entry points to explore photography's relationship to capitalism, labor, land, and both literal and cultural extraction"-- Provided by publisher.
"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." -- Publisher's description

ISBN:

9781478030188 paperback
1478030186 paperback
9781478025931 hardback
147802593X hardback
(electronic book)
9781478059172

Subject:

Photography History.
Photography Environmental aspects.
Photography Equipment and supplies.
Photographie Histoire.
Photographie Aspect de l'environnement.
Photographie Appareils et matériel.
photographic equipment.
photography.
Photography

Form/genre:

History

Holdings:

Location: Library main 328053
Call No.: 328053
Copy: 1
Status: Available

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