Photography and extraction: Ways of seeing/ways of knowing
UCD Humanities Institute Seminar Room (H.204) and online
Apr 25, 4:00 pm–5:15 pm
Dr Siobhan Angus (Carleton) will deliver the sixth seminar, ‘Photography and extraction: Ways of seeing/ways of knowing’, in our Methodologies concerning Extractivism series on Thursday 25 April at 4pm. The seminar will be held in the UCD Humanities Institute seminar room and online.
Abstract: 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.
Dr Siobhan Angus is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Carleton University. Prior to joining Carleton, Angus was the Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art at Yale University. In 2023, she is a visiting scholar at the Yale Center for British Art. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Visual Culture from York University. Her dissertation was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal. Her research has been published or is forthcoming in Environmental Humanities, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, Radical History Review, Capitalism and the Camera (Verso, 2021) and October. Her book, Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke University Press 2024) explores the mineral history of photography through an emphasis on mined materials that have been used in photographic processes.
For online attendance please register via the link below.
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