What is a photograph without light? In Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography, Siobhan Angus assembles a history of photography around the elements extracted from the earth that the medium requires. In doing so, Angus redirects discourses on photographic history about power often framed with the lens (that is, light, focus, exposure, and so forth), toward the mined metals that undergird our image-saturated world, the land from which they originate, the labor required to process them, and the environmental aftermath of their extraction. She argues that “the mine is a necessary precondition for photography as a medium” (4).

Camera Geologica is structured around six core chapters that amplify a material and the photographic processes they support: oil (bitumen), silver (albumen and gelatin), platinum (platinotype), iron (cyanotype), uranium (radiography), and rare earth elements (digital). The first section of each chapter provides general background on the main material, including information on its chemical properties, required processing, and general historical framing. Further sections explore various aspects of the element’s intersecting labor and photographic histories, either through historic or contemporary examples. Central to Angus’s analysis is the work of contemporary artists who “are critically reactivating these analog methods” (20). These contemporary works provide an opportunity to make conscious and explicit photographic connections among materials, bodies, and environments. Angus grounds this analysis in a Marxist historical-materialist framework that remains embedded in the historical and contemporary material realities of our world, which mediate relations among people, places, and artworks to produce politics and cultural ideologies, including extraction as a worldview.

The first chapter, “Bitumen and a Reorientation of Vision,” focuses on photography’s entanglements with the oil industry. Core to this chapter is the work of Warren Cariou, a contemporary photographer and professor of Métis and European descent who collects bitumen from the Athabasca tar sands of western Canada to produce a body of work that captures the impact of the material’s extraction as a key source of oil for the region. This petrography is based in close study of the first photographs by Nicéphore Niépce, one of the founding figures of photography in the early nineteenth century, who used bitumen of Judea to engrave and set an image. Cariou’s works become relational through their reflective surfaces, and it is through subject, process, and material effect that Angus mobilizes Cariou’s petrography as a method to critique the “extractive gaze.” Angus argues for a reorientation of photographic discourse from an extractive gaze, one predicated on a language of “taking” driven by industrial capitalism, towards relational encounter based in Indigenous traditions of “gathering” and reciprocity (64). This theme becomes implicit through the following chapters.

Chapter two, “Silver and Scale,” takes on silver nitrate, the most crucial material in analog photography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which has become the center of much current and forthcoming scholarship in the field of photography. The chapter comprises three distinct sections that engage with aspects of the material’s production: the silver mine through photographs of the Comstock Lode, commodity traders who exchanged processed materials on the market, and Kodak’s role as a chemical company. Across these examples, Angus argues that economies of scale intentionally obscure and disconnect the laborers behind these different stages of silver’s transformation from raw ore to sensitized silver nitrate.

The next two chapters explore less prominent elements connected to photographic print processes: platinum and iron. Chapter three positions the rise of platinum printing within the context of increased coal-based emissions during the Industrial Revolution. At the turn of the twentieth century, fine arts photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Curtis promoted platinum prints as the ideal medium to evoke atmospheric effects suited to the photographic movement of pictorialism. Angus shows how platinum printing was also driven by its material stability in increasingly polluted urban centers, unlike silver, which corrodes. By centering the agency of atmospheric pollution, Angus introduces a key concept, “material interference,” that reveals links between “the physical waste of the very industrial society that likewise produced photography’s cherished basic materials” (119). Similarly, in the fourth chapter, Angus centers another contradiction within photography’s materiality: iron’s industrial strength and its chemical instability brought together through the cyanotype. Angus positions the element of iron as a critical connector among plants via Anna Atkins’s nineteenth-century cyanotypes of algae and ferns; industry, through Gilded Age industrial blueprints; and humans, with LaToya Ruby Fraizer’s contemporary cyanotypes of the US Rust Belt. The chapter’s strength is Angus’s theorization of blueprints as a technology that “anticipates its own futurity . . . a replicable and predictable future premised on growth” (153), which is immediately complicated through Fraizer’s cyanotype portraits of working-class communities in the Rust Belt.

The final two chapters test the limits of vision by focusing on uranium and rare earth elements. While uranium is not a significant material for photographic technology, Angus uses it to engage a core theme in the field of photography: the limits of human sight through the X-ray, spectacularizing images of the atomic bomb, and contemporary environmental studies that amplify ideas of phytoremediation, or the slow healing through natural processes of landscapes damaged by industrial extraction. Despite discussion of the Manhattan project within the homelands of Pueblo, Apache, and Navajo Nations, the role of photography in documenting the impact of radiation poisoning on Indigenous miners and community members was a surprising exclusion, particularly given the visibility of Will Wilson’s ongoing Auto Immune Response (AIR) project (2004–present). The final chapter considers the material costs of our contemporary digital world by focusing on rare earth elements that are important colorants for digital screens but whose sites of extraction are rarely photographed because of security. To address this paradox, Angus pivots to three other elements that have drawn the attention of photographers: lithium mining in Edward Burtynsky’s images of industry in Chile’s Atacama Desert (2017), fiberoptic cables that support the Cloud in Trevor Paglen’s NSA-Tapped Undersea Cables (2016), and the artisanal processes behind recycling e-waste in Pieter Hugo’s images of Agbogbloshie Market in Accra, Ghana (2009). These artworks reveal the material lifecycle of the digital that is too often described as immaterial.

The book concludes with Warren Cariou’s Boreal Web (2017), a petrograph made with the aid of a digital image of a delicate spiderweb that radically contrasts with his images of refineries in Western Canada. In doing so, Camera Geologica ends with a visual model of connection grounded in ecology instead of capitalist production. As a capstone to this complex history of photography, Angus challenges readers to engage in photographic looking by slowing down and shifting our own vision from an extractive gaze towards one of relationality and reciprocity.

In its direct reference to Roland Barthes’s canonical Camera Lucida (1980), the title Camera Geologica aptly captures Angus’s ability to wield the canon of photographic history, from content to criticism, to support her fundamental pivot to materiality. Angus draws on major thinkers in the field with ease, particularly Allan Sekula, Walter Benjamin, and T.J. Demos, while continually connecting back to origin figures like Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre. A reader who is unfamiliar with these photographers or scholars may find certain passages of this book opaque. However, Angus’s accessible and fluid prose provides entry points for audiences beyond photo history. This book also presents a honed vocabulary for scholars in the environmental humanities through concepts such as overburden, the extractive gaze, and material interference. Each chapter addresses a developing subtheme in the field, including energy humanities (chapter one), extractive studies (chapter two), and environmental justice (chapters four, five, & six). Some chapter sections could stand alone as assigned readings for intersecting subjects as wide-ranging as nuclear imaging, architectural blueprints, and media studies more broadly.

Given the global reach of photography in both production chains and histories, it is unsurprising that the geographical focus of the book is broad. Angus leads her reader across the globe within and between the chapters, from the seventeenth-century silver mines of Potosí, Bolivia, to the nineteenth-century steel-town of Altoona, PA, to modern-day mines of Deep City Gold Mines of Johannesburg, South Africa, and the Bayan Obo rare earth mines of Mongolia. As we learn from Angus’s analysis of silver through the concept of scale, it is intentionally impossible to see capitalist production as a continuous, discernible whole. Angus’s historical-materialist methodology requires us to shift quickly between locations, often making it difficult for the reader to hold a grounded position for long. It is, therefore, also impossible to fully see the history of photography from the perspective of minerals in an age of globalization. Accordingly, geographic and temporal discontinuity could have been more explicitly stated as a feature of the book’s methodology. In the wake of this temporal and geographical movement, the reciprocity Angus calls forward requires an intimate knowledge of local ecologies that the scales and chains of capitalism intentionally obscure. Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography leads us to this web of hidden relations, providing scholars with a range of draglines to follow into new stories waiting to be revealed.