The Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities has announced that the 8th Denis Cosgrove Lecture will be given on Monday 12 May at 5:30pm. This year's lecture will be on Camera geologica: photography and the art of resource extraction. It is presented by Dr Siobhan Angus, assistant professor of media studies at Carleton University, Ottawa.The lecture will take place at Queens Building Lecture Theatre, Royal Holloway, followed by a reception. The lecture will be in person only. Siobhan Angus's book of the same title was amongst the most significant published in 2024.
The lecture focuses on Jonas NT Becker’s 'Better or Equal Use' series, which documents former coal mining sites in Appalachia redeveloped under the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA). Becker prints his photographs using coal collected from the sites he documents, forging a connection between the mined material, the history it represents, and the photographs themselves. Becker's labour-intensive prints offer an entry point for exploring the relationship between aesthetics and extraction, with particular attention to the afterlives of mining. Accordingly, I explore the geological history of photography by analyzing the materiality of Becker’s carbon prints, with a focus on coal and gelatin.
Siobhan Angus works at the intersections of art history, media studies, and the environmental humanities. Her current research explores the visual culture of resource extraction with a focus on materiality, labor, and environmental justice. Angus is an assistant professor of media studies at Carleton University. She is the author of Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke University Press 2024). awarded the 2024 Photography Network Book Prize, and her research has also been published in Environmental Humanities, liquid blackness, and October.
Camera geologica: photography and the art of resource extraction
Siobhan Angus, Carleton University
12 May 2025
Royal Holloway College, Egham,
Free. To book click the link here
Image: Carleton Watkins, Malakoff Diggins, Nevada County, California. 1871. Albumen print. The Bancroft Library. University of California, Berkeley
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