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Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography
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 metals is a precondition of photography. Photography, Angus contends, begins underground and, through 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.
328 pages, Hardcover
Published March 22, 2024
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January 16, 2026the photo is a fascinating intersection - it's formed of materials that are extracted from the earth (this goes for physical and digital images alike, when one considers the rare earth elements required to build smartphones and maintain the cloud), and its uses are nearly infinite - a photo can draw attention to injustice or manipulate our perception of it
this book weaves photography's historical narrative with its often (literally) buried material one. surprise surprise, being that photo came about during the 19th century (more or less), it's very very implicated in colonial extraction and exploitation of the earth and its people... as is essentially everything we engage with in the modern age. I say this because at a certain point the content of the book began to feel a bit repetitive, like, to my non academic eyes, very few genuinely new arguments were posited in the middle chapters, before we got a banger finale on the ugly side of the digital photo economy (did you know the vast majority of the cloud travels beneath the ocean in fiber optic cables?)
nonetheless this was a brain tickler, a brain scraper, even - some of these sentences were massive
this book weaves photography's historical narrative with its often (literally) buried material one. surprise surprise, being that photo came about during the 19th century (more or less), it's very very implicated in colonial extraction and exploitation of the earth and its people... as is essentially everything we engage with in the modern age. I say this because at a certain point the content of the book began to feel a bit repetitive, like, to my non academic eyes, very few genuinely new arguments were posited in the middle chapters, before we got a banger finale on the ugly side of the digital photo economy (did you know the vast majority of the cloud travels beneath the ocean in fiber optic cables?)
nonetheless this was a brain tickler, a brain scraper, even - some of these sentences were massive
May 4, 2025
With this book Angus wants to ‘propose a reorientation of perspective that restores the photograph to histories of materials, land, property, and labor’ (8). She links this explicitly to the current climate crisis. To understand “how we got here and where we go from here”, she wants readers to think about resource extraction through the representation it makes possible (i.e. photographs). Readers familiar with Donna Haraway will recognise how Angus wants them to “stay with the trouble” and keep the ecology of photography – especially its reliance on extraction – in mind (229). Photography, where the immaterial “image” has historically been prioritised over its materiality, is ripe for such a “reorientation”. Rather than a "history" of photography, it helps seeing this work as being more concerned with connecting past and present ecological and social injustices through the theme of photography.
The book’s six chapters each foreground a material mined from the earth that has played an important role in photography: bitumen, silver, platinum, iron, uranium, and the general category of rare earth metals. Each of these materials, or elements, is paired with an analytical lens, which connects their extraction with photography and ultimately the climate crisis. The chapter on silver is about the scale of industrial mining and photography; platinum connects photography of atmospheres with atmospheric pollution; rare earth metals are a way for Angus to discuss the “de-materialisation” of modern-day photographic culture. Across these chapters, Angus particularly takes a Marxist approach to the history of photography, focusing on labour and the material/infrastructural foundations of social life (inspired perhaps by her own family history in mining).
Angus expertly weaves these connections between mining, photography, and climate change, in what reads less like an “elemental history of photography” and more like a source book for an environmental humanities course. These connections are the main strength of the book, but also sometimes a cause for irritation, as Angus’s interpretations felt to me like they were too divorced from the source material. I found this especially in the chapter on iron, in which she links the use of iron in photographic processes with Victorian industrialisation and the “unstable boundaries” between human and “extra-human” worlds. Broaching such a broad topic, mainly through one photographer’s work (Anna Atkins) no less, was always going to be a tough task. She doesn’t make it easier on herself by declaring her intent to look at how artists created “visual vocabularies” to respond to industrialisation’s social, cultural, and ecological impacts, casting her net even wider.
That chapter stood out to me as one where the social/cultural/ecological themes she wanted to highlight were very much predetermined and given priority, leaving their link to iron (in photography) a little thin. Compare this with the next chapter on uranium (my favourite), and it’s clear to me that the most compelling parts of her argument are the ones where the theme (in this case of invisibility) is firmly rooted in specific episodes of the history of photography (in this case of early radiation science and nuclear testing in WWII).
Angus’s book can be considered part of environmental art history. But as mentioned above, it’s probably more like an interdisciplinary environmental humanities reader than an art-history book. It reminded me in particular of works that take a particular material or phenomenon and create a prismatic narrative about its relationship to society, culture, and economy, doing so in a theory-heavy way. Think Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman or The Marvelous Clouds. But unlike these works Angus has an explicit focus on labour and extraction, which links her book to environmental histories, political ecologies, and histories of technology with a similar focus on resources and mining. Two recent reads that come to mind are Carbon Technocracy and More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy.
As expected, the book is very well produced, featuring lots of crisp colour plates and enticing imagery. Readers will find plenty of references to prominent works in the environmental humanities – perhaps more than necessary. I actually found the Introduction less compelling than the chapters that followed it, perhaps because it felt a lot more like a literature review than a statement of intent, and featured too much overexplaining for my liking. This while each chapter has really gripping opening sections. I’m sure I’ll remember the silver chapter, for example, which opens with the remarkable statistic that an estimated 25% of silver produced worldwide over the 20th century was used in photography (67).
The book’s six chapters each foreground a material mined from the earth that has played an important role in photography: bitumen, silver, platinum, iron, uranium, and the general category of rare earth metals. Each of these materials, or elements, is paired with an analytical lens, which connects their extraction with photography and ultimately the climate crisis. The chapter on silver is about the scale of industrial mining and photography; platinum connects photography of atmospheres with atmospheric pollution; rare earth metals are a way for Angus to discuss the “de-materialisation” of modern-day photographic culture. Across these chapters, Angus particularly takes a Marxist approach to the history of photography, focusing on labour and the material/infrastructural foundations of social life (inspired perhaps by her own family history in mining).
Angus expertly weaves these connections between mining, photography, and climate change, in what reads less like an “elemental history of photography” and more like a source book for an environmental humanities course. These connections are the main strength of the book, but also sometimes a cause for irritation, as Angus’s interpretations felt to me like they were too divorced from the source material. I found this especially in the chapter on iron, in which she links the use of iron in photographic processes with Victorian industrialisation and the “unstable boundaries” between human and “extra-human” worlds. Broaching such a broad topic, mainly through one photographer’s work (Anna Atkins) no less, was always going to be a tough task. She doesn’t make it easier on herself by declaring her intent to look at how artists created “visual vocabularies” to respond to industrialisation’s social, cultural, and ecological impacts, casting her net even wider.
That chapter stood out to me as one where the social/cultural/ecological themes she wanted to highlight were very much predetermined and given priority, leaving their link to iron (in photography) a little thin. Compare this with the next chapter on uranium (my favourite), and it’s clear to me that the most compelling parts of her argument are the ones where the theme (in this case of invisibility) is firmly rooted in specific episodes of the history of photography (in this case of early radiation science and nuclear testing in WWII).
Angus’s book can be considered part of environmental art history. But as mentioned above, it’s probably more like an interdisciplinary environmental humanities reader than an art-history book. It reminded me in particular of works that take a particular material or phenomenon and create a prismatic narrative about its relationship to society, culture, and economy, doing so in a theory-heavy way. Think Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman or The Marvelous Clouds. But unlike these works Angus has an explicit focus on labour and extraction, which links her book to environmental histories, political ecologies, and histories of technology with a similar focus on resources and mining. Two recent reads that come to mind are Carbon Technocracy and More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy.
As expected, the book is very well produced, featuring lots of crisp colour plates and enticing imagery. Readers will find plenty of references to prominent works in the environmental humanities – perhaps more than necessary. I actually found the Introduction less compelling than the chapters that followed it, perhaps because it felt a lot more like a literature review than a statement of intent, and featured too much overexplaining for my liking. This while each chapter has really gripping opening sections. I’m sure I’ll remember the silver chapter, for example, which opens with the remarkable statistic that an estimated 25% of silver produced worldwide over the 20th century was used in photography (67).
March 21, 2024
Interviewing her tomorrow for ASLE's EcoCast!
November 17, 2024
A book with an excellent selection of artists and an interesting topic, but I can’t help but feeling like it’s analysis was a little bit lacking in some respects. One particular pet peeve (which I don’t think is at all exclusively the sin of this author but of art historians more broadly) is the analysis ending at initial connection or observation. For example, the author describes many works as indexical of the material processes used to produce their image/media (an observation I agree with) but I didn’t always get a sense of why I should care much that the works were indexical. If the point of the indexicality in the analysis is that photography is a physical/material process, I think we’ve usually known that historically. At times it felt hard to identify un any other arguments. The only reason it may feel like an intervention now is the occlusion of the material basis of modern photography by large digital corporations. The author does address that occlusion here and I think it’s one of the strongest points of the book, although I do think that a good amount of that infrastructure is used for far more than photography, so the extent to which that observation is coextensive with digital photography alone is a bit unclear.
May 25, 2024
Angus asks us to approach the history of photography from a different angle, one that closely scrutinizes the production processes and materials that make each photograph possible, whether print or digital. By doing this, Angus argues that we can more easily connect photography to systems of consumption and exploitation. Angus' chapters are broken down by material - bitumen, silver, platinum, iron, uranium, and rare earth elements - and the aspects of photography that each of these materials bring to the fore - reorientation, scale, atmosphere, instability, photography beyond vision, and de/materialization. Each chapter is driven by a selection of images that exemplify the argument made and the high-quality, colour prints bring a great deal of life to the written discussion. This is a great example of environmental media scholarship. Angus connected a lot of dots that I had not connected on my own in the past, and I come out of this reading experience with a better understanding of the world and systems in which I live.
June 11, 2024
**Review forthcoming in RACAR**
November 19, 2024
read intro and second chapter Silver and Scale
May 3, 2025
another case of incredible archive, and underwhelming execution—though this is maybe a quibble of discipline more than anything else
September 18, 2025
My first book ever on photography
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews