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Dependent on the extractive practices of fossil-fueled industrial capitalism, chemical photography’s emulsions and films were highly sensitive to polluted atmospheres, and photographic companies had to work hard to control this sensitivity. Drawing on histories of empire, coal, and chemistry and from the archives of British photographic manufacturer Ilford Limited,(...)
A dirty history of photography: Chemistry, fog, and empire
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Dependent on the extractive practices of fossil-fueled industrial capitalism, chemical photography’s emulsions and films were highly sensitive to polluted atmospheres, and photographic companies had to work hard to control this sensitivity. Drawing on histories of empire, coal, and chemistry and from the archives of British photographic manufacturer Ilford Limited, Michelle Henning exposes the ways photography shaped how we see and understand the atmosphere while leaving its toxic residues in the air, soil, and water. Structured as thirty-six short chapters and with over seventy illustrations, this innovative book begins in interwar London, follows the supply of Ilford products to photographers on the West African coast, and considers photography as a military technology linked to the development of chemical warfare. Combining close readings of photographs with discussions of low-light, tropical, and aerial photography, Henning examines the extraction and development of photographic materials, their role in the current environmental crisis, and how they have shaped experiences of time and the environment.
Theory of Photography
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This important book tells the multifaceted story of humankind’s relationship with flooding, a story that is permeated with a history of both worship and fear. Modern water engineering has turned plains and valleys into fully inhabitable environments. At the same time, those environments have become highly vulnerable to climate change. In efforts to prevent future floods,(...)
Floodscapes: contemporary landscape strategies in times of climate change
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This important book tells the multifaceted story of humankind’s relationship with flooding, a story that is permeated with a history of both worship and fear. Modern water engineering has turned plains and valleys into fully inhabitable environments. At the same time, those environments have become highly vulnerable to climate change. In efforts to prevent future floods, countries are rediscovering adaptation strategies: making room for flooding, redistributing risks and reconsidering the use and legal status of floodplains. Through historical investigations and six contemporary projects implemented in four European countries, "Floodscapes" illustrates how flood-mitigation measures can be embedded in local space and culture. Merged with landscape development, agriculture, recreation, nature, and even urban growth, river management becomes a design issue, giving landscape architects and urban designers a prominent role in future transitions. This book provides an in-depth look into the most common natural disaster in the US, and the innovative solutions that have arisen.
Environment and environmental theory
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Bringing together media studies and environmental humanities, the contributors to ''Saturation'' develop saturation as a heuristic to analyze phenomena in which the elements involved are difficult or impossible to separate. In ordinary language, saturation describes the condition of being thoroughly soaked, while in chemistry it is the threshold at which something can be(...)
Environment and environmental theory
November 2021
Saturation: an elemental politics
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Bringing together media studies and environmental humanities, the contributors to ''Saturation'' develop saturation as a heuristic to analyze phenomena in which the elements involved are difficult or impossible to separate. In ordinary language, saturation describes the condition of being thoroughly soaked, while in chemistry it is the threshold at which something can be maximally dissolved or absorbed in a solution. Contributors to this collection expand notions of saturation beyond water to consider saturation in sound, infrastructure, media, Big Data, capitalism, and visual culture. Essays include analyses of the thresholds of HIV detectability in bloodwork, militarism's saturation of oceans, and the deleterious effects of the saturation of cellphone and wi-fi signals into the human body. By channeling saturation to explore the relationship between media, the environment, technology, capital, and the legacies of settler colonialism, ''Saturation'' illuminates how elements, the natural world, and anthropogenic infrastructures, politics, and processes exist in and through each other.
Environment and environmental theory
Paul Rousteau: Seascapes
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French artist Paul Rousteau is known for his alchemic light and colour-bending approach to photography. Seascapes is a series made by Rousteau while artist-in-residence on a boat off the Coral Sea, in Australia. Inspired by the unending horizons around him, Rousteau retreated to the darkroom to invent mental topographies of his own, reducing the landscape down to the(...)
Paul Rousteau: Seascapes
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French artist Paul Rousteau is known for his alchemic light and colour-bending approach to photography. Seascapes is a series made by Rousteau while artist-in-residence on a boat off the Coral Sea, in Australia. Inspired by the unending horizons around him, Rousteau retreated to the darkroom to invent mental topographies of his own, reducing the landscape down to the barest constituent elements – water, air and light. Often saturated, interrupted or out of focus, his photographs are series of playful experiments navigating between figuration and abstraction, painting and digital art. These constructed landscapes invite us to consider the point where human imagination interacts with the landscape - how fantasies of distance, displacement and faraway places are projected onto the horizon. Existing somewhere between vision, imagination and a surreal, submerged reality, Rousteau extends this fiction through globetrotting captions and an innovative design that invites readers to rip away and reappropriate the seascapes as their own.
Photography monographs
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French cultural historian DeJean presents an entertaining account of how home life was virtually reinvented in Paris from 1670 to 1765 as sofas, running water and flush toilets appeared in modern residences: the city became a giant workshop in which inventions in the arts and crafts and innovative technologies were tried out. Louis XIV's and Louis XV's royal mistresses(...)
History since 1900, Reference Books
September 2009
The age of comfort: when Paris discovered casual and the modern home began
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French cultural historian DeJean presents an entertaining account of how home life was virtually reinvented in Paris from 1670 to 1765 as sofas, running water and flush toilets appeared in modern residences: the city became a giant workshop in which inventions in the arts and crafts and innovative technologies were tried out. Louis XIV's and Louis XV's royal mistresses displayed a bold vision for integrating architecture, interior decor and fashion, thus influencing modern comfort. In private mansions, French architects subdivided interior space to allow for varying degrees of privacy. As bathing became a pleasurable, commonplace activity, tubs became more comfortable and were redesigned as decorative objects in their own right. Men fell in love with the superexpensive flush toilet; the sofa—created by the architect Meissonnier—attained instant celebrity status; and interior decoration became a subset of the new architecture of private life as Parisians discovered that domestic interiors should be the expression of their personal taste.
History since 1900, Reference Books
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Under capitalism, economic growth is seen as the key to collective well-being. In "Self-Devouring Growth" Julie Livingston upends this notion, showing that while consumption-driven growth may seem to benefit a particular locale, it produces a number of unacknowledged, negative consequences that ripple throughout the wider world. Structuring the book as a parable in which(...)
Self-devouring growth: a planetary fable as told from southern Africa
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Under capitalism, economic growth is seen as the key to collective well-being. In "Self-Devouring Growth" Julie Livingston upends this notion, showing that while consumption-driven growth may seem to benefit a particular locale, it produces a number of unacknowledged, negative consequences that ripple throughout the wider world. Structuring the book as a parable in which the example of Botswana has lessons for the rest of the globe, Livingston shows how fundamental needs for water, food, and transportation become harnessed to what she calls self-devouring growth: an unchecked and unsustainable global pursuit of economic growth that threatens catastrophic environmental destruction. As Livingston notes, improved technology alone cannot stave off such destruction; what is required is a greater accounting of the web of relationships between humans, nonhuman beings, plants, and minerals that growth entails. Livingston contends that by failing to understand these relationships and the consequences of self-devouring growth, we may be unknowingly consuming our future.
Environment and environmental theory
books
Description:
231 pages : illustrations, facsimiles ; 23 cm
Montréal : [publisher not identified], 1891 (Montréal : Waters Bros.)
The Windsor Hotel guide to the city of Montreal, and for the Dominion of Canada.
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231 pages : illustrations, facsimiles ; 23 cm
books
Montréal : [publisher not identified], 1891 (Montréal : Waters Bros.)
books
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[4] pages, 68 leaves of plates : chiefly color illustrations ; 31 cm
New York : D.A.P., 2002.
Portraits / Wolfgang Tillmans.
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[4] pages, 68 leaves of plates : chiefly color illustrations ; 31 cm
books
New York : D.A.P., 2002.
books
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59 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates, 106 pages : color illustrations ; 26 cm
Shanghai, China : Tongji University Press : Xinhua Bookstore Shanghai Publishing House, 1984., Shanghai : Tong ji da xue chu ban she : Xin hua shu dian Shanghai fa xing suo fa xing, 1984.
On Chinese gardens / Chen Congzhou.
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59 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates, 106 pages : color illustrations ; 26 cm
books
Shanghai, China : Tongji University Press : Xinhua Bookstore Shanghai Publishing House, 1984., Shanghai : Tong ji da xue chu ban she : Xin hua shu dian Shanghai fa xing suo fa xing, 1984.
books
Description:
173 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm.
Toronto, Ontario, Canada : Alchemy by Knopf Canada, 2025., ©2025
The city of our dreaming / Laleh Khalili, V. Mitch McEwen, Gabriela Leandro Pereira, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson ; introduction by Christina Sharpe.
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173 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm.
books
Toronto, Ontario, Canada : Alchemy by Knopf Canada, 2025., ©2025