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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!
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February 24, 2026I found Angus’s definition of photography as a medium analogous to an ecotone particularly inspiring:
“As a medium, photography is analogous to an ecotone. It is at once an art, science, and technology; evidentiary and aesthetic; a material object and representation; fixed and contingent. In keeping with this, I approach photography as a zone of tension rather than trying to locate photography in any one category. Photography’s overlapping spheres of influence and unstable boundaries make it a fruitful site for ecological thought.” (20)
I find this entire paragraph to be a powerful counterpunch to the perpetual debate about the ontology of photography — the attempt to define and delimit what photography is and what it should be, often at the expense of specific practices, contexts, and the processes that occur both before and after the image itself. It helps us think about photography beyond categorical frameworks and engage more productively with the object, practice, and representation through multilayered, multifaceted perspectives.
Aside from this wonderful paragraph, I also admire her comprehensive interweaving of critique on capitalism, colonialism, anthropocene, with the central theme of extraction. It is well noted on where she addresses the following into account:
“Environmental racism has global dimensions: corporations have largely outsourced extraction and waste dumping to the Global South. This neocolonial process alleviates the immediate violence of extraction in the countries that bear the most responsibility for climate breakdown. Environmental injustice tracks the fault lines of race, class, and geography.” (8)
It beautifully encapsulates how discourse and practice around photography have invisibilized — or at least contributed to invisibilizing — global chains of injustice and overlapping systems of oppression by disguising them while emphasizing photography’s supposedly immaterial qualities. Decolonizing photography is not achieved simply by diversifying its content or represented subjects, but by radically exposing the medium’s structural entanglement with systems of power and oppression — and by constructing a decolonized imaginary through the medium itself.
Personally, I found Angus’s exploration of photography’s inextricable entanglement with ecology much more compelling than Zylinska’s. I’d like to discuss this further in class, especially through a more concrete comparison with my classmates. I also love how Angus situates herself in her research, sharing how her family upbringing is, in part, a driving force behind her scholarship. I think this is a powerful and responsible way to engage with society as a researcher. I would especially set her introduction as a model to reference in the future.
I really enjoyed reading Chapter 4, where Angus weaves together the material history of photography, slavery, capitalism, systemic racism, (de)industrialization, and issues of health and ecology. I felt that my understanding of the histories related to photography gradually expanded as she built her narrative—from Anna Atkins’s devalued “amateur” cyanotypes, to her complicity in slavery, to LaToya Frazier’s photographic work, which centers on her own family’s experience within a (de)industrialized city and labor history.
I found Angus’s appreciation of Frazier’s work to be, in some ways, in dialogue with the telling of her own family history in the introduction. However, there is a stark distinction: while Frazier’s lineage is rooted in Black womanhood and resistance within oppressed laboring communities, Angus’s family history is tied to settler-colonial privilege, and her miner ancestors were primarily male (grandfathers)—positioning her, perhaps inevitably, in a way that partially mirrors Anna Atkins’s positionality. I speculate that this may be part of the reason Angus chose not to insert herself and her biographical background more explicitly throughout the text, remaining relatively reserved except in the final paragraphs of the introduction.
Inserting myself into the reading, I found that this particular chapter prompted me to think more about the relationships between the Black community and the Asian diaspora in the U.S.—a group that arrived relatively later, and to a different degree, by choice. Many Asian immigrants have, at times, taken on roles that replaced more or less skilled labor positions previously held by racially marginalized groups—those who, as Angus puts it, faced "last-hired, first-fired layoff structures."(156) This made me reflect on historical moments like the L.A. Riots, where tensions between the Korean and Black communities came to a head (though those tensions had been building long before the incident). It raises important questions about the position—and supposed role—of the “latecomer” on this land, and how that position intersects with both Black struggles and the histories and rights of Indigenous peoples.
“As a medium, photography is analogous to an ecotone. It is at once an art, science, and technology; evidentiary and aesthetic; a material object and representation; fixed and contingent. In keeping with this, I approach photography as a zone of tension rather than trying to locate photography in any one category. Photography’s overlapping spheres of influence and unstable boundaries make it a fruitful site for ecological thought.” (20)
I find this entire paragraph to be a powerful counterpunch to the perpetual debate about the ontology of photography — the attempt to define and delimit what photography is and what it should be, often at the expense of specific practices, contexts, and the processes that occur both before and after the image itself. It helps us think about photography beyond categorical frameworks and engage more productively with the object, practice, and representation through multilayered, multifaceted perspectives.
Aside from this wonderful paragraph, I also admire her comprehensive interweaving of critique on capitalism, colonialism, anthropocene, with the central theme of extraction. It is well noted on where she addresses the following into account:
“Environmental racism has global dimensions: corporations have largely outsourced extraction and waste dumping to the Global South. This neocolonial process alleviates the immediate violence of extraction in the countries that bear the most responsibility for climate breakdown. Environmental injustice tracks the fault lines of race, class, and geography.” (8)
It beautifully encapsulates how discourse and practice around photography have invisibilized — or at least contributed to invisibilizing — global chains of injustice and overlapping systems of oppression by disguising them while emphasizing photography’s supposedly immaterial qualities. Decolonizing photography is not achieved simply by diversifying its content or represented subjects, but by radically exposing the medium’s structural entanglement with systems of power and oppression — and by constructing a decolonized imaginary through the medium itself.
Personally, I found Angus’s exploration of photography’s inextricable entanglement with ecology much more compelling than Zylinska’s. I’d like to discuss this further in class, especially through a more concrete comparison with my classmates. I also love how Angus situates herself in her research, sharing how her family upbringing is, in part, a driving force behind her scholarship. I think this is a powerful and responsible way to engage with society as a researcher. I would especially set her introduction as a model to reference in the future.
I really enjoyed reading Chapter 4, where Angus weaves together the material history of photography, slavery, capitalism, systemic racism, (de)industrialization, and issues of health and ecology. I felt that my understanding of the histories related to photography gradually expanded as she built her narrative—from Anna Atkins’s devalued “amateur” cyanotypes, to her complicity in slavery, to LaToya Frazier’s photographic work, which centers on her own family’s experience within a (de)industrialized city and labor history.
I found Angus’s appreciation of Frazier’s work to be, in some ways, in dialogue with the telling of her own family history in the introduction. However, there is a stark distinction: while Frazier’s lineage is rooted in Black womanhood and resistance within oppressed laboring communities, Angus’s family history is tied to settler-colonial privilege, and her miner ancestors were primarily male (grandfathers)—positioning her, perhaps inevitably, in a way that partially mirrors Anna Atkins’s positionality. I speculate that this may be part of the reason Angus chose not to insert herself and her biographical background more explicitly throughout the text, remaining relatively reserved except in the final paragraphs of the introduction.
Inserting myself into the reading, I found that this particular chapter prompted me to think more about the relationships between the Black community and the Asian diaspora in the U.S.—a group that arrived relatively later, and to a different degree, by choice. Many Asian immigrants have, at times, taken on roles that replaced more or less skilled labor positions previously held by racially marginalized groups—those who, as Angus puts it, faced "last-hired, first-fired layoff structures."(156) This made me reflect on historical moments like the L.A. Riots, where tensions between the Korean and Black communities came to a head (though those tensions had been building long before the incident). It raises important questions about the position—and supposed role—of the “latecomer” on this land, and how that position intersects with both Black struggles and the histories and rights of Indigenous peoples.
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 - 10 of 10 reviews