Skip to content
1981
Violence, Part 2
  • ISSN: 2040-3682
  • E-ISSN: 2040-3690

Abstract

This article sets out to draft a preliminary sketch of an environmental history of photography, as opposed to a history of environmental photography. It shows that such a history should be rooted in a conceptualization of our geological epoch as the Capitalocene: the age of capital. Seen in this light, photography can be understood as part of a longer history of what the article describes – building on the work of activist and journalist Raj Patel and environmental historian Jason W. Moore (2018) – as the ‘cheap image’. In this way, photography is shown to offer a succinct expression of the Cartesian dualism that Patel and Moore see as being at the heart of the Capitalocene: the externalized image of capital N nature that this world ecology necessitated. The article considers (Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, 2022) a recent exhibition and catalogue that attempted to narrate in exhibition form a history of photography from such a perspective. Finally, it concludes with a discussion of the work of several artists from this exhibition who are seen as exemplifying ‘metabolic realism’, a new critical photo-based artistic approach.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1386/pop_00069_1
2024-01-18
2026-01-15
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Acosta, I., Ribas, X. and Purbrick, L. (2019), ‘Trafficking the earth, documents on nitrate, copper, and capitalism’, Transformations Journal, 33, n.pag.
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Anderson, B. (1983), Imagined Communities Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso Books.
    [Google Scholar]
  3. Bender, G. and Simonsen, R. R. (2021), Photography’s Materiality’s: Transatlantic Photographic Practices over the Long Twentieth Century, London: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  4. Bozak, B. (2012), The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  5. Bozak, B. (2022), ‘Digital images and the cost of resource extraction’, in B. Levin, E. Ruelfs and T. Beyerle (eds), Mining Photogrpahy: The Ecological Footprint of Image Production, Leipzig: Spector Books.
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Buchloh, B. H. D. and Wilkie, R. (1983), Mining Photographs and Other Pictures 1948–1968: A Selection from the Negative Archives of Sheddon Studio, Glace Bay: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
    [Google Scholar]
  7. CDP (2017), The Carbon Majors Database CDP Carbon Majors Report 2017, CDP: Driving Sustainable Economies, https://cdn.cdp.net/cdp-production/cms/reports/documents/000/002/327/original/Carbon-Majors-Report-2017.pdf. Accessed 18 September 2023.
    [Google Scholar]
  8. Charbonnier, P. (2021), Affluence and Freedom: An Environmental History of Political Ideas, Cambridge: Polity Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  9. Clark, B. and Foster, J. B. (2005), ‘Ecological imperialism and the global metabolic rift: Unequal exchange and the guano/nitrates trade’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 50:3&4, pp. 31134.
    [Google Scholar]
  10. Coleman, K. and James, D. (2021), Capitalism and the Camera: Essays on Photography and Extraction, London: Verso Books.
    [Google Scholar]
  11. Crutzen, P. (2002), ‘Geology of mankind’, Nature, 415, p. 23.
    [Google Scholar]
  12. Daston, L. and Galison, P. (1992), ‘The image of objectivity’, Representations, 40, pp. 81128.
    [Google Scholar]
  13. Edwards, E. and Hart, J. (eds) (2004), Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of Images, New York: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  14. Foster, J. B. (1999), ‘Marx’s theory of metabolic rift: Classical foundations for environmental sociology’, American Journal of Sociology, 105:2, pp. 366405.
    [Google Scholar]
  15. Foster, J. B. (2000), Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New York: New York University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  16. Foster, J. B. and Clark, B. (2020), The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift, New York: New York University Press, p. 23.
    [Google Scholar]
  17. Foster, J. B., York, R. and Clark, B. (2010), The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, New York: New York University Press, p. 46.
    [Google Scholar]
  18. Ghosh, A. (2016), The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  19. Haraway, D. J. (1988), ‘Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14:3, pp. 57599, https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.
    [Google Scholar]
  20. Haraway, D. J. (2016), Staying with the Trouble, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  21. Hecht, G. (2018), ‘Interscalar vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On waste, temporality, and violence’, Cultural Anthropology, 33:1, pp. 10941, https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.1.05.
    [Google Scholar]
  22. Henning, M. (2018), Photography: The Unfettered Image, London: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  23. Hunter, M. C. (2020), Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  24. Komprozos-Athanasiou, A. (2022), Speculative Communities: Living With Uncertainty in a Financilized World, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  25. Levin, B., Ruelfs, E. and Beyerle, T. (eds) (2022), Mining Photography: The Ecological Footprint of Image Production, Leipzig: Spector Books.
    [Google Scholar]
  26. Malm, A. (2013), ‘The origins of Fossil Capital: From water to steam in thre British cotton industry’, Historical Materialism, 21:1, pp. 15–68.
    [Google Scholar]
  27. Malm, A. (2016), ‘Who lit this fire? Approaching the history of the fossil economy’, Critical Historical Studies, 3:2, pp. 21548.
    [Google Scholar]
  28. Malm, A. and Hornborg, A. (2014), ‘The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative’, The Anthropocene Review, 1:1, pp. 6269.
    [Google Scholar]
  29. Marx, K. (1981), Capital, vol. 3, London: Penguin.
    [Google Scholar]
  30. Maynard, P. (2000), The Engine of Visualization: Thinking Through Photography, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  31. Maxwell, R. and Miller, T. (2012), Greening the Media, New York: Oxford University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  32. Mintie, K. (2020), ‘Material matters: The transatlantic trade in photographic materials during the nineteenth century’, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, 6:2, https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.10597.
    [Google Scholar]
  33. Montell-Boyd, F. (2021), ‘Silver and speculation in William Henry Fox Talbot’s early photographic experiments’, The Material and the Virtual in Photographic Histories, Photography Network’s 2021 Virtual Symposium, 7–9 October.
    [Google Scholar]
  34. Moore, J. W. (2000), ‘Environemtal crises and the metabolic rift in the world-historical perspective’, Organization & Environment, 13:2, pp. 12357.
    [Google Scholar]
  35. Moore, J. W. (2015), Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Acccumulation of Capital, London: Verso Books.
    [Google Scholar]
  36. Moore, J. W. (2016a), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, Oakland, CA: PM Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  37. Moore, J. W. (2016b), ‘Nature/society and the violence of real abstraction’, Jason W. Moore, https://jasonwmoore.wordpress.com/2016/10/04/naturesociety-the-violence-of-real-abstraction/. Accessed 14 January 2023.
  38. Nixon, R. (2011), Slow Violence and the Enviromentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  39. Patel, R. and Moore, J. W. (2017), A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  40. Ruccio, D. (2011), ‘Anthropocene: Or how the world was remade by capitalism, occasional links and commentary’, Ocassional Links and Commentary On Econonmics, Culture and Society, https://anticap.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/anthropocene%e2%80%94or-how-the-world-was-remade-by-capitalism/. Accessed 14 January 2023.
    [Google Scholar]
  41. Saito, K. (2017), Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy, New York: Monthly Review Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  42. Sekula, A. (1981), ‘The traffic in photographs’, Art Journal, 41:1, pp. 1525.
    [Google Scholar]
  43. Sekula, A. (1983), ‘Photography between labor and capital’, in H. D. Buchloh and R. Wilkie (eds), Mining Photographs and Other Pictures 1948–1968, Halifax, NS: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
    [Google Scholar]
  44. Talbot, H. F. (1844), The Pencil of Nature, London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans.
    [Google Scholar]
/content/journals/10.1386/pop_00069_1
Loading
/content/journals/10.1386/pop_00069_1
Loading

Data & Media loading...

  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): Anthropocene; capitalism; Capitalocene; ecology; metabolic rift; realism
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a success
Invalid data
An error occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error
Please enter a valid_number test