Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography is a groundbreaking study of photography by art historian, curator, and organiser Siobhan Angus. Joining her is Kelly McCormick, whose recent research into photography’s relationship with exposing industrial pollution events in Japan will frame a critical discussion on what we see – or what is obscured – when we look at photographs.

Camera Geologica is published by Duke University Press. Copies will be available for purchase and signing after the talk.

This conversation is co-presented by the Critical Image Forum, an initiative for Research in Photography and Expanded Documentary at the University of British Columbia.

Doors Open: 6pm
Conversation and Q&A: 6:30 – 7:30pm
Reception and Book Signing: 7:30pm

RSVPs are helpful

About the book:

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 traces the mining of bitumen, silver, platinum, iron, uranium, and rare earth elements is a precondition of photography. Photography, Angus contends, begins underground. Through a materials-driven analysis of visual culture, she illustrates histories of colonization, labour, 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.

About the presenters:

Dr. Siobhan Angus is an art historian, curator, and organizer. Specializing in the history of photography and the environmental humanities, her current research explores the visual culture of resource extraction with a focus on materiality, labor, and environmental justice. At the heart of her research program lies an intellectual and political commitment to environmental, economic, and social justice. Angus is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Kelly Midori McCormick is a historian of Japanese photography whose research explores the ways Japan’s social, political and cultural transformations shape photographic culture and the mass press; state implementations of photography and uses of photography against the state; the gendering of photographic technology and industrial design; the values embedded into the materiality of images and objects; the politics of museum practices of collection and display; and the relationship between photography and protest of environmental degradation. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia.