Abstract
The photographic image has been a loyal companion to environmental movements far and wide, yet a closer look at the contemporaneous appearance of photography and industrialism complicates that dependence. This article examines contemporary artistic representations of postindustrial landscapes through their entanglement with the history and materiality of photography. Drawing on elemental media theory as well as the history of science, it traces two key moments in the history of photography through two material components: bitumen and uranium. By suggesting the visual and the material as integrated concepts, the article probes a double materiality—that of the landscape and its deterioration as a result of chemical production or mining, and that of the image itself. The analysis is anchored in concrete sites where photographic materialities are made and unmade: Canada’s Athabasca tar sands region, through Warren Cariou’s photographic series Petrographs (2014–); the former uranium mining territories of Gessenwiese and Kanigsberg, as seen in Susanne Kriemann’s long-term project P(ech) B(lende) (2014–19); and a chemically contaminated lake that served as a wastewater deposit for a film factory, as depicted in Alexandra Navratil’s video Silbersee (2015). These projects question photography’s geochemical origins and its attendant labor and exhaustion, and they come to serve a renewed aesthetics in contemporary postindustrial landscape imagery that grapples with the medium’s own contradictions.
In his brief essay “Photography and Liquid Intelligence” (1987), Jeff Wall draws an immediate link between photography and the natural world. He envisages the deep time of the photographic camera, in which “the apparatus itself can be thought of as not yet having emerged from the mineral and vegetable worlds.”1 In this speculative prehistory of the medium the photographic apparatus, and by extension the latent photograph that it carries, are material potentialities still encrusted in the earth’s resources. The photograph, says Wall, “embodies a memory-trace of very ancient production processes—of washing, bleaching, dissolving and so on, which are connected to the origin of the techne—like the separation of ores in primitive mining.”2 Wall’s observation is straightforward. The very practice of photography, he argues, is inherently bound to and dependent upon natural resources—it is thus unthinkable without the removal of natural resources and ensuing pollution, since extraction ranks among the key drivers of land deterioration and biodiversity loss. Extending Wall’s insight into a specific genre—namely, contemporary photography of postindustrial landscapes—sets the stage for considering photography not only in its ability to represent mostly invisible phenomena—industrialism’s insidious remnants: toxicity, pollution—but also in its complicity with them. Read through the prism of pollution and toxicity, then, Wall’s photographic tale acknowledges photography’s capacity to represent polluted landscapes but also the production of photographic images as polluting. What are we to do in the face of this complicity?
Such complicities are galvanizing recent work on the fraught relationship between technologies of representation and extractivism. Wall’s mid-1980s materialist ruminations reverberate in media-archaeological-inspired work all around. Much has been said recently on the materiality of photographic and filmic technologies, the global material flows they rely on, and their ensuing environmental footprint.3 And although discussions of the dematerializing effects of photography are hardly new—from the increasing reliance on third parties for obtaining the image in its beginnings to the second dematerialization with digital images—they are called up anew in light of photography’s central role in the current ecological predicament. By engaging the intersecting histories of photography and extraction, this article argues that the medium’s geochemical origins, and its attendant labor and exhaustion, are increasingly questioned in contemporary postindustrial landscape imagery that grapples with the medium’s own contradictions. It explores a double materiality—that of the landscape and its deterioration as a result of mining and that of the image itself—ultimately pointing to the visual and the material as integrated concepts. In attending to photographic-extractive materiality it also points to the bodies who mined the materials, arguing for the necessary inclusion of labor, and ensuing bodily exhaustions, in discussions on photography’s toxic ecologies.
In what follows, I explore the interpenetration of the visual and the material, starting with a discussion on the contemporaneous appearance of photography and industrialism, then situating their interdependence in recent scholarship on the materiality of media—photographic and beyond. By looking at two key moments in photographic history through two material components, bitumen (tar) and uranium, I then home in on contemporary artistic representations of postindustrial landscapes and the latter’s entanglement with the history of photography and that which sustains it: extractive labor. My analysis is anchored in concrete sites where photographic materialities are made and unmade: Canada’s Athabasca tar sands region, through Warren Cariou’s photographic series Petrographs (2014–), and the former uranium mining territories of Gessenwiese and Kanigsberg, Germany, as seen in Susanne Kriemann’s long-term project P(ech) B(lende) (2014–19). I conclude my discussion by looking at the photographic industry’s aftermaths in a chemically contaminated lake that served as a wastewater deposit for the film factory Agfa-Orwo, as depicted in Alexandra Navratil’s photographic essay Silbersee (2015). All these works revisit industrialism’s insidious residues through photographic history and materiality: waste, labor and fatigue, toxicants, oil, radioactivity.
But before looking closely at these works and their negotiation of photographic materiality, it is important to situate them in a larger historical framework where photography and environmentalism go hand in hand—a codependence persisting to this day.
Environmentalism, Art, and the Camera
The inextricable relationship between photography and the natural resources that sustain it, as sketched out by Wall, becomes a knotty one when we consider the fundamental role images played and continue to play in understandings of environmental harm. Writing about the nineteenth century, Susan Sontag observed that “cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.”4 Photography has been, historically and in the present, an essential tool of environmental movements. Images have played a significant role in Western environmental discourse, deeply rooted as it is in European Romanticism. Environmental movements have repeatedly turned to the camera to document natural landscapes under threat. In the eyes of North American environmental reformers, for example, notes historian Finis Dunaway, the camera was a technology of memory that could preserve landscapes increasingly imperiled by booming industry.5 Geographer Denis Cosgrove, for his part, argues that throughout the twentieth century photojournalism, cinema, and television regularly wielded iconic environmental images such as photographs of atomic explosions and satellite views of Earth from space in order to sanctify nature.6 Art historian Gisela Parak points to 1970s Environmental Protection Agency–commissioned photographs of polluted sites as contributing to an understanding of the very notion of “the environment” in the United States.7 Political theorist Teena Gabrielson foregrounds the central role of images in environmental justice initiatives through a more inclusive socioecological visual repertoire.8 In short, as the multiplicity of scholarly voices just cited substantiates, it is not misleading to venture that the photographic image, whether still or moving, has been a loyal companion to environmental movements far and wide.
The alliance between the camera and environmentalism has found a second life in contemporary landscape photography that proliferates within discussions of the Anthropocene. Pictures of postindustrial landscapes have become a veritable subgenre of such discussions. From the oft-cited (and deeply criticized) photographs of ravaged landscapes of Texas oil refineries by Edward Burtynsky, to Marianna Christofides’s filmic essays on industrial remains in the Balkans, Days in Between (2015), and a flourishing host of artists working on the fringes of art and geography, postindustrial imagery abides in the field of contemporary art. This imagery, in turn, has accompanied the plethora of research on the crucial role of photography, and art more broadly, in the context of the contemporary ecological predicament, which has seen the light of day these last years in the environmental humanities. These contemporary artistic and scholarly practices are far-reaching and premised to varying degrees on queries similar to those in earlier iterations of environmentalism and the camera: Can the visual medium capture the invisibility of certain forms of pollution? Conversely, what does this visualization accomplish beyond the domain of aesthetics?
The recognition of and subsequent greater emphasis on the ecological reality of landscapes in contemporary photography is in many ways indebted to the influential 1975 exhibition New Topographics.9 In grouping practitioners such as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, and Bernd and Hilla Becher, among others, the show signaled a major shift in landscape photography. Moving away from pristine depictions of wilderness epitomized by the likes of Ansel Adams, artists of the “new topographics” were producing ostensibly vapid images of urban landscapes, prompting a critical reexamination of representations of seemingly human-free scenes. Depictions of landscapes as residues of intensely exploitative industrial activity have become an increasingly important chapter in recent photography. In an essay in the catalog published on the occasion of the iconic show’s reenactment in 2010, Dunaway drew an immediate link between 1960s environmentalist sentiments and the “new topographics,” interpreting the movement as “contributing to ecological citizenship by encouraging viewers to form attachments to a broader continuum of sites.”10 The power and potential of these industrial and postindustrial landscape depictions, whether from the 1970s or in their more recent variations, is undeniable. Yet the geographies and subjects of the “new topographics” illustrated a mostly white and masculine vantage point.11 In short, even if they foregrounded what was cropped out of the landscape frame so far—residual waste, industrial parks, road infrastructure—the racial and social inequalities of these same views were stiffly absent.
The industrial imagery of the “new topographics” offered an important but partial narrative around environmental concerns. By contributing to the construction of an image of industrialized nature floating free from the material circumstances of maker and subject, the very materiality of the medium evaporated, aiding in discounting issues of labor, photographic and extractive. In the 1980s Allan Sekula, although unconcerned with photographic eco-materiality, was pointing to a similar paradox: “The camera appropriated nature for science, and did so by scientific means. . . . Photography, as a cultural practice, could signify both the domination and preservation of nature.”12 Photography’s centrality in environmental imaginaries is thus underwritten by its double function, at once dominating nature but also visually preserving it. Similar utilitarian understandings of art, and critiques thereof, which Sekula himself deeply critiqued, have also been targeted more recently within the environmental humanities. In a nod to similar assertions, literary scholar Nicole Seymour encourages eco-critics to engage with cultural and artistic objects beyond their “capacity to inculcate ‘proper’ environmentalist feelings, . . . educate the public, incite quantifiable environmental activism, or even solve environmental problems.”13 In the case of postindustrial landscape photographs, this would mean pushing beyond their symbolic status as mediators of the environment to see them as a result of industrial processes of production—that is, to engage with photographic materiality and labor. Or, to extend Wall’s speculative prompt, to broach the longue durée of photography: from extraction, mineral refinement, chemical interactions in the laboratory, industrial labor, and production all the way to distribution.
Before Photographs Become Photographs
Such a query aligns, to some extent, with recent debates from the field of media archaeology, especially writings stemming from its neomaterialist aficionados. Thanks to the work of scholars such as Jussi Parikka, Jennifer Gabrys, and Sean Cubitt a host of mediatic objects are increasingly assessed through their ecological footprint—in other words, as the results of extractive/industrial processes. In her natural history of electronics, Gabrys explores the flow of electronics from development through production, use, storage, wasting, decay, and/or salvage.14 Parikka, in his geology of media, suggests geological matter not only as a condition of the materiality of media made from minerals run on fossil fuels like oil and coal, but also as a founding mediation of which technical media are merely paragons.15 Cubitt states that “the iron in our blood, the salt in our tears, tie us as deeply to our tools and planet as to one another,”16 ably describing a continuity between the material constitution of our bodies and the media we use.
These insights can be traced all the way back to Walter Benjamin, especially his argument in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility” (1935), in which he famously asserted that the age of photographic reproduction diminished the authenticity of aesthetic experience, inaugurating a radically democratic mode of reception.17 The distance between original and reproduced artwork, however, also alienated the viewer, a detachment that nowadays we tend to regard as an inherent property of technical media. Today, in a moment of intersecting global crises that has drawn comparisons to the 1930s, Benjamin’s position warrants ecological readings.18 Indeed, in the third version of his essay, Benjamin himself hinted at an ecological lexicon when he cited Paul Valéry, drawing a telling parallel between the supply of electricity and water in our homes and the supply of visual and auditory images that will appear and disappear with a simple movement of the hand.
This simple movement of the hand paints a telling image within our own discussion on extraction. It brings to mind archetypal shots of hands holding minerals: hands of miners, hands of prospectors, hands of geologists. All hands of labor under capitalism—of the labor also involved in the making of images and in that which precedes it. This simple movement of the hand also presupposes something Parikka evokes early on in his geology of media when he asserts that “the materiality of media starts before media become media.”19 In the case of photography, its materiality begins before the photograph is an object to be seen—when it is still in the earth’s resources, per Wall, or perhaps in the manufacturing stage of its chemical components, in the factory. The affinities between this fragment from Parikka and Wall’s snippet with which this essay opened are explicit. Both are concerned with raw matter before its transformation through industrial processes into what are essentially commodities. The Canadian artist-researcher Warren Cariou, of Métis and European heritage, and the German artist Susanne Kriemann are also concerned with this moment in time where photographs are still material possibilities—before photographs become photographs. To examine this “before,” albeit engaging with different aspects of photographic materiality and its polluting impact, they pay close attention to the material origins of the medium and their eco-political implications.
Before Photographs Become Photographs, Act 1: Bitumen
One material that has been important in the history of photography is bitumen, an oil derivative obtained by the partial distillation of crude petroleum. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, bitumen is a “dense, highly viscous, petroleum-based hydrocarbon that is found in deposits such as oil sands and pitch lakes (natural bitumen) or is obtained as a residue of the distillation of crude oil (refined bitumen). . . . Bitumen is often called asphalt, though that name is almost universally used for the road-paving material. . . . Bitumen is also frequently called tar or pitch.”20 Bitumen, a mineral turned object. Some terms in this brief definition already imbue it with a ubiquitous feel while firmly situating it in the contemporary ecological debate. Asphalt: bitumen is omnipresent in our everyday environment, as it is used on roads. Tar: bitumen is also implicated in today’s contentious debates around energy, as tar sands, a mucky deposit composed of bitumen, sand, clay, and water, lie beneath northern Alberta’s soil in Canada. Bitumen is extracted on the lands of various First Nations communities. Its extraction is much more polluting than that of conventional crude oil, making it a central feature of Indigenous activist politics in today’s Canada. Yet it is also, as I learned from Cariou’s petrographs, what Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used to create what is considered the first photograph.
This first photograph dates from 1827 and is a hazy, elevated view of a space between two houses. The roofs are barely visible, and one can discern the contours of a tree in the background. To create this picture, Niépce dissolved light-sensitive bitumen in lavender oil then applied it thinly over a metallic plate.21 After several days of exposure to sunlight, the plate produced a faint impression of what was outside the window. Niépce famously came to call this process héliographie, or “sun writing,” from the Greek words hélios (sun) and graphé (writing). Cariou has been repurposing Niépce’s heliographic method, creating photographs in an analogous manner that he in turn baptizes “petrographs.” His own characterization is instructive: “Petrography is literally petroleum-photography: the creation of images through the interaction of sunlight and the heavy petroleum product known as bitumen, which is the main source of the vast supplies of oil in Canada’s Athabasca tar sands region.”22
Using the dérivé of petroleum that is bitumen as a medium of representation, Cariou’s petrographs depict the effects of oil sand’s industrial development on the Canadian landscape. Cariou gathers bitumen from the tar sands then creates the chemical mixture used for the production of the petrograph. The petrographs depict various aspects of the extractive landscape, ranging in scale and theme from close-up shots of industrial machinery to more removed panoramic views. They are somewhat blurry but retain a shiny, golden-dark-brownish palette. Most have a rough, tenebrous quality. Syncrude Plant and Tailing Pond Reflections (fig. 2, 2014), for example, is a shot of a rather conventional industrial setting, a frontal depiction of a water deposit in front of cylindrical factory furnaces. On its surface is mirrored a shapeless spot that resembles a bird’s shadow, one of the rare traces of life in the series. Its top is composed of the peaks of the chimneys, yet no smoke is gushing out. Instead the imperfections of the technique of heliography-turned-petrography, with its imprinting of dots and flares on the photographic surface, produce cloudlike shapes in the sky. In Tailings Pond with Strip Mines in Distance (fig. 1, 2014), the subject matter is less visible and thus less legible. It is the rather factual title of the image, like others of the series such as Stripped Land, Outflow Pipe, Ponds (2014) or Syncrude Storage Tanks and Infrastructures (2014), that give away what we are actually looking at. The conventionally geometric forms of tailing ponds become elusive as Cariou’s bitumen mixture bleeds onto the photographic plate and, figuratively, back onto the landscape where it originates. As these brief descriptions disclose, what takes over the viewer’s reception of the extractive landscape of the Athabasca oil sands is not a stark visual articulation of those rather common industrial sights but the blurs and the gloominess, the general sense of pictorial imprecision.
The lack of visual exactitude has implications for the status of the pictures, complicating environmentalist understandings of images as mere pictorial mediators of polluted landscapes. First and foremost there is the detachment of Cariou’s photographs from their status as documentary pictures of industrial development, unlike the pictures of the new topographics and their contemporary continuators mentioned above. This shift in status situates Cariou’s petrographs as both visual and material documentation of the tar sand landscape. His petrographs embody Nadia Bozak’s definition of cinematic and photographic landscapes “as both an aesthetic category and a physical reality, both representing and contributing to the decay of the environment.”23 The blemishes compose an image of visual and material decay of the very object of representation, linking to their material referents in Wall’s prephotographic vegetable and mineral worlds. What Cariou brings forth, then, is the photographic apparatus, and by extension the photographic medium, as matter. As Siobhan Angus notes, Cariou’s images are a “a move toward a land-based photography, bringing into view the complex networks of settler colonialism, petrocapitalism, and consumption.” 24 His focus is thus on photography’s toxic histories, its materialities, its entanglement—its complicity?—with industrial tales of one of the dirtiest forms of energy, rather than its ability or inability to represent the inherently invisible phenomenon of pollution. In other words, the photograph is not only about what we see but also about how it is made and, as I will elaborate shortly, about how we come to see it.
Bitumen Complicities and Positionalities
Cariou has tried to reproduce the heliographic process not only in the chemical mixture of bitumen but also in the photosensitive surface on which his petrographs are imprinted. Like Niépce’s “first picture,” he also develops his photographs on metallic plates. Some are printed on aluminum, others on stainless steel. The artist has experimented with the different surfaces to test bitumen’s interaction with these two metallic materials, and the aesthetic effect is essential. First, the photographs are experienced differently according to luminosity. Depending on when and where we are looking at them, sometimes they appear relatively darker or fainter. Cariou has gone so far as to suggest that they are better experienced during this moment of transition from light to dark. Second, and most important, the person looking at an image is often reflected in the metallic plate thanks to its mirrorlike effect.
Understood as a metonym for the permeability of humans to toxicants, this blurry reflected figure is a visual reminder of our own bodily entanglements with and inseparability from chemicals in everyday life. Pondering on the reflective effect of another material, aluminum foil, in the context of environmental illness, cultural scholar Ruby de Vos has suggested foil as “an ambiguous indicator” of bodily porosities.25 Stacy Alaimo has influentially defined a transcorporeal relation to the world that relies on a reciprocal recognition: that the environment is not located “somewhere” out there but is always the very substance of ourselves in a relational modality with our surroundings.26 For Alaimo all bodies, human and nonhuman, are intrinsically permeable. They are subject to material relations with and through their environments, a condition Alaimo later defined as exposure.27 Yet, as we know all too well, these exposures are terribly uneven. Indigenous lands have been disproportionally exposed to toxicities. What is foregrounded in these uncanny, mirrorlike effects are thus not only human vulnerabilities but also complicities. Looking into these bitumen-mirrors is also looking into our actions and, by extension, into complicities that make some of us more vulnerable than others. Looking into pictures of industrial landscapes, in short, is also looking into ourselves. Integrating the visual and material realms, Cariou’s petrographs remind us that material coimplication also signals different forms of complicity.
This analysis bespeaks my own positionality and cultural understandings of mirrors as a white researcher, educated in European universities, and indebted to Lacanian psychoanalysis and the mirror stage as a prerequisite for the formation of the “I.” As Max Liboiron emphatically writes, colonial land relations are not abstracted and monolithic but manifest in familiar places and practices such as reading—and, dare I add, reading artworks.28 It is thus important to question our understanding of bitumen as inherently polluting and “bad.” Bitumen becomes so through exploitation by white human use and might have a very different status for an artist like Cariou. Similarly, the reflected human figure is not inherently menacing and gloomy. The mirrored image could also gesture to a reciprocity between the human and the more-than-human worlds, a dense relationality that Indigenous cosmologies have long theorized. It’s perhaps appropriate, then, that the Dene people of northern Alberta are said to collect naturally occurring bitumen along the Athabasca River to maintain their canoes, as recounted by Zoe Todd, a Métis artist and fish philosopher.29 In some contexts, bitumen can keep life going.
Through that lens, its industrial extraction is not just polluting. More fundamentally, it hinders the capacity of Indigenous people to work with and adapt to their land. Industrial access to resources that produce photographs, among other things, also prohibits certain forms of relating to land when, paradoxically, such photographic representations are supposed to elevate environmental sentiments. While we move from canoes to roads to photography, we start getting a grip on bitumen’s unstable meanings and uses as it enters a field of messy and paradoxical possibilities that Todd calls “oil/gas pluralities.”30 Cariou’s petrographs should be grasped at the juncture of those pluralities: they represent and materialize at once violent and reciprocal relationships to nature and its elements, at once settler and Indigenous perspectives, at once human and more-than-human communities.
Hiding Extractive Labor
Thinking of the bodies that relate to bitumen in plural ways is thinking of those implicated in the extraction of the resources necessary for the photographic frame before it becomes one. To do so we should complement the contemporaneous emergence of photography and industrialism in the nineteenth century, stated in this article’s beginning via Sontag, with a third component: the concealment of the labor necessary for the production of the energy that fueled industrialism (and, by extension, photography). This is what Cara New Daggett advances in her questioning of the supposed innateness of the Western ethic of the work-energy nexus. Taking my cue from Daggett, in the remainder of this article I focus on the specific ways photographic materiality relies on work. I explore how both the production of energy and photographic labor, in a strikingly similar manner, have relied on perfectly concealed totalities through another material: uranium. But before homing in on uranium through the work of Susanne Kriemann, I want to scrutinize the ways energy and labor became interdependent realities.
Energy “as a political rationality that justifies extractivism and imperial capitalism” was a nineteenth-century achievement in large part thanks to the emergence of the “new” science of energy, thermodynamics. This was the moment, Daggett states, when “work” became “energetic.”31 This was the moment when energy, as a notion, acquired a universal value thanks to which all activity on earth became related to work. Importantly, this innateness, the idea that energy is absolutely necessary for work and that work is absolutely necessary for energy, is still how the Western world relates to its resources—a “ruling logic of energy, which justifies the indexing of human well-being according to the idealization of work and an unquestioned drive to put the Earth’s materials to use for a profit.”32 The science of energy became a science of work, and laborers were rendered synonymous with energy-transforming machines. One of the tactics to sustain this “ruling energy logic” was to hide labor behind the facade of these novel industrial machines, masking any sensory awareness of those bodies who threatened the new energy economy: the idle, the sick, those putting the dirty work, and their bodies, on the line to ensure the efficient use of energy.33 To ensure that no energy was lost, and that the underbelly of labor remained invisible.
Daggett’s story is a familiar one. Western populations still tend to overlook the infrastructures, human and machinist, that ensure our steady supply of energy (remember Valéry’s simple movement of the hand). Daggett’s focus is on Victorian Britain and factories, yet it strongly holds for another story of concealed labor, that of uranium mining. Extractive practices might have materially differed from the factory system, yet, as Sekula has noted, “on a symbolic level mining represented the prototypical form of industry.”34 More recently Kathryn Yusoff has described the mine as “an industrial blueprint” that foretells the linkage of racial inequalities with “planetary dissolve.”35 Similarly, uranium, as the mineral used in the first atomic bomb, and its extraction have remained on the edges of historical analysis and public visibility.36 This long history of labor, from its very beginning in the sixteenth century, was connected to lung diseases in miners of the Schneeberg region of Saxony thanks to the inhalation of metallic brumes.37 Georgius Agricola, the metallurgist who wrote De Re metallica (1556), the first treatise describing a transition from artisanal to engineering mining, mentions a haunting image of lungs rotting away. Later accounts corroborated his findings: “Similar symptoms were found in pitchblende miners in Jáchymov, Czechoslovakia. After the symptoms were linked to malignant tumors in the late nineteenth century, ‘Schneeberg lung cancer’ was listed as an occupational disease.”38 Despite this long-standing knowledge, uranium mining kept on going under deplorable conditions all throughout the twentieth century, mostly in then-colonized, or now settler-colonial, territories including Niger, Gabon, Australia, and Canada. Miners got sick, companies (to a large extent) evaded culpability, atomic bombs and nuclear reactors banked on invisible labor, and medical invisibilities were safeguarded.
Before Photographs Become Photographs, Act 2: Uranium
Why does this story matter to us? Uranium, unlike bitumen, is not a fossil fuel. But like oily bitumen, it is a material that revolutionized energy supply. Thinking them together also allows us to see how fossil and nonfossil fuels, so far separate in bibliographies on petro- and nuclear cultures, might share more than we like to think. More importantly uranium, much like bitumen, is connected to another inaugural photographic image: the first image of radioactivity. In 1896 the French physicist Henri Becquerel accidentally left uranium salts on photographic plates overnight and discovered the next morning, after developing the plates, that the radiation from the uranium had left a clear imprint, without exposure to sunlight.
Becquerel continued to research this phenomenon and in 1903 published the result of his findings in Recherches sur une propriété nouvelle de la matière (Research on a New Property of Matter), a book illustrated with no fewer than sixty “autoradiographs” that offered visual proof of these “mysterious emissions,” as he liked to call them. An important aspect of Becquerel’s photo-scientific experimentations was that their “visual look,” as historian of photography Kelley Wilder has put it, was wholly new. Becquerel creatively manipulated his uranium samples in the laboratory, twisting and turning the photographic plates.39 Uranium’s image-inducing properties were to be exploited by the industry, leaving the strict confines of science to enter the military domain and also the film and photography industries. Uranium played an important role in the production of film and prints notably through uranium nitrate, a salt used as a tonic agent; it induced the terra-cotta color that emblematized silent films in the 1930s.40 Incidentally, the uranium salts used by Becquerel came from the same mines where lung disease was diagnosed four centuries prior in the former Czechoslovakia (the mines that also supplied Marie Curie’s radioactivity research for three decades).41 Those are also the territories where Kriemann has been deploying a long-term artistic practice.
Kriemann’s research terrain is the Wismut uranium mining sites in the former East Germany and Czechoslovakia, which as early as 1949 supplied the USSR with uranium. P(ech) B(lende) (2014–19) is a long-term project on radioactive invisibilities taking its title from pitchblende, the German term for uraninite, used by miners to refer to minerals whose density suggests metal content. Uraninite has been known since the fifteenth century, as it was extracted from silver mines in the Ore Mountains on the current German-Czech border. P(ech) B(lende) is a multifaceted work deploying a host of mediums ranging from an artist’s book to a photographic installation shown in several exhibitions in varied contexts. Recurring figures are autoradiographs produced by the exposure of pitchblende on photographic paper.
The pictures in the opening pages of Kriemann’s book P(ech) B(lende): Library for Radioactive Afterlife (2016) are reminiscent of the new “visual look” of Becquerel’s autoradiographs. The artist accessed pieces of radioactive mineral from various museum mineralogical collections, including New York’s American Museum of Natural History and Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde, then, in total darkness in the obscurity of museum storage, exposed them and collected their imprints on paper. Activating the political potential of the trace, the artist tracked the movement of the stone across geographies—from the Erz Mountains to New York City—much like the global mineral flows today. The images are disarmingly simple: white on black, taking abstract forms that look like tiny sparks. Varying in shape and size, their visual intensity fluctuates. They have a grainy quality that evokes both depth and porosity, suggesting radioactive particles entering surfaces, bodies, environments. Their tactility reminds us of the artist’s hand manipulating the stone, opening a reflection on artistic labor and bodily encounters with (toxic) materials. These visual impressions of radioactivity come close to what Georges Didi-Huberman has defined as “contact images” (images par contact), images of imprints that incite visual perception to give way to motivity or almost to a sort of tactility.42 The autoradiographic imprints are fully grounded in materiality.
On the bottoms of the images are brief captions printed in the same glistening white—ten days, fourteen days, seven days, twenty-one days—referring to the number of days the artist exposed the specimen on the photosensitive surface. Exposure times were essential for Becquerel’s autoradiographs. In Kriemann’s “contact images” the longer the exposure, the fainter the black-and-white contrast and the brighter the result (fig. 3). Through these seemingly puny indicators, the artist achieves something more than experimenting with uranium’s aesthetic qualities. She gestures to the obvious yet underrecognized fact that producing photographs involves labor, sometimes also lengthy time spans. Cariou also deploys long exposure times, sometimes up to sixteen hours. Long exposure times, in fact, were a technical necessity in early photography: Niépce let his camera sit in his window for multiple hours, if not days, in order to make what is now the earliest surviving photograph made using bitumen. Yet long exposure times could also be instrumentalized, related as they are to a history of economic control and erasure of labor. In nineteenth-century urban photography they were intentionally employed to achieve the erasure of people on the streets, presenting instead urban settings artificially devoid of humans and thus of their labor.43
Hiding Photographic Labor, and Fatigue
In 1833 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre depicted a bourgeois man having his shoes polished by a shoeshine boy in Paris. It is considered the first photograph in which human movement was arrested.44 Reflecting on this daguerreotype, Sekula asks: “What is celebrated? . . . What is obscured, denied, disavowed? The productive moment, the energetic blur of that other body, unacknowledged, the working body, the invisible shoeblack.”45 The invisibilization of labor is what is obscured and what Sekula seeks to insert back into the history of photography, showing the medium as also complicit in capitalist abstraction—or, as he puts it, how the conflation of photography as work and photography of work tends to erase the former. A later caricature ironizing daguerreotypes and daguerreotypists, Les daguerreopipeurs ou le talent vient en dormant (1840) depicts a scene that aptly expresses the crisis of labor the new mechanical medium provoked: a daguerreotypist in an alcohol-induced sleep. This lazy photographer is surrounded by excesses in bodily pleasures, a bottle of wine and a pipe. A watch hanging from his hand ticks off the passing minutes while the sun does the work of inscribing an image onto a photographic plate. In this image, following E. P. Thompson’s now-classic adage, time passes, it is unproductive, it is not spent, it is not currency, as industrialism would want it.46 The debauched daguerreotypist summons, as Sekula points out, a long association of photography with passivity, sedation, exhaustion, and death.47 In his critique of capitalist labor the photographer is not only an idle worker but also a tired one.
Indeed, fatigue, says Daggett, and not only idleness, was becoming the enemy of labor.48 Kriemann’s inclusion of exposure times—and perhaps more subtly, Cariou’s frequent references to these—could also be read through the prism of fatigue, as in bodily exhaustion from long days of exposure, manipulation of geological samples, journeys back and forth to museum storage areas, jaunts to extraction sites, and so on. It circles us back not only to artistic labor and exhaustion but also to uranium extractive labor and durations of exposure of the miners themselves. The number of hours miners spent in radioactive environments was also quantified in terms of exposure. Sometimes the miners wore a film badge that measured levels of exposure over a set amount of working hours,49 functioning like an autoradiograph. Exposures, bodily and photographic, dictate the visual results of Kriemann’s autoradiographs, illustrating the ways human duration and agency interfere with uranium’s residual traces. They enable us to understand how it is always bodies that interact with these minerals, gesturing toward the broader ecological implications of longer exposure times and exhaustions.
Importantly, these exhaustions are not only bodily but ecological in a deeper sense. Amid the autoradiographs one can also discern a different kind of picture: black-and-white aerial views of postindustrial landscapes taken in the Erz Mountains (fig. 4). The predominant element appearing in the backgrounds are industrial hills—piles of slag, the solid residues from the smelting of metal ore. Dates are mentioned at the bottoms of the images, ranging from the 1960s to the early twenty-first century.50 Tucked among them are lines from the poem “pech & blende” (2000) by the German poet Lutz Seiler. Seiler’s lexicon oscillates between earth and body, speaking of bones, breath, and slag heaps, asserting continuities between bodies and environment. His subjects are the miners who worked in Thuringia, the region where Kriemann operates and from which Seiler hails. In his shattering essay “The Territory of Tiredness,” Seiler describes how his miner grandfather and colleagues constantly described symptoms of tiredness.51 The anthropomorphism that surfaces here, however, is not one of cursory human-natural mimicry. Rather, in situating uranium lands and mining bodies as likewise tired, Kriemann helps us see that bodily exhaustions are, unfailingly, environmental.
The piles of mining debris, reminiscent of the waste heaps of the “new topographics” that were to become archetypal signs of postindustrial landscapes, mark a threatening presence to humans and to the environment. The very notion of industrial waste is an analytical category that conflates useless laboring bodies—tired, idle, or sick—with the energetic uselessness of material residues. As Daggett discerns, “Waste is a common code applied to those bodies and activities that threaten energy governance.”52 The wasting of laboring bodies through dehumanization of human labor has, after all, its very origin in the racialized discipline of geology. As Yusoff argues, the category of the inhuman owes its existence to geology and its conceptualization of certain humans as inhuman through slavery. Its understanding of matter as active or inert was applied to both corporeal and mineralogical matter.53 First humans as geo-matter, then humans as waste; images of waste piles, in Kriemann and beyond, should also be conceptualized via that route.
Understanding photography’s predication on extracted materials, and its representation of residues of extraction, paves the way for recognition of the medium’s contradictory nature. Recognizing photography’s ecology, its very materiality, also inscribes it in darker histories of extraction and labor than environmentalism’s faith in pictorial devices would wish for. By taking us back to the material, but also the historical, origins of photography, Kriemann and Cariou are not mere nostalgic escapists; they throw into sharp relief the fact that the representation of extractive landscapes, of landscapes of labor, always relies on extractive labor itself. Such practices dismantle the illusion that images of postindustrial landscapes can, in and of themselves, provide awareness of the ecological predicament. They engage their own material conditions of production.
Contemporary photography’s eco-toxic-material experimentations also offer a topical expansion of Sekula’s still-relevant reflection on the medium’s fraught relationship to labor. It is, I think, no coincidence that Sekula spent considerable time on representations of mining labor. Tellingly, his essay “The Emerging Picture-Language of Industrial Capitalism” (1983) starts with a careful and long discussion of the illustrations in De Re metallica (1556), which he sees as the forerunners to the photographs conceived to improve industrial processes under Taylorism. He goes on to reflect on nineteenth-century photographs of underground labor, incidentally also of bitumen extraction in another part of Canada, tracing a techno-extractive realism across centuries that is ultimately concerned with the material conditions of both the representation of labor and the labor of representation.54 Practices like Cariou’s and Kriemann’s capture that dialectical interplay in eco-material terms: their industrial motifs are representations of extractive labor while also gesturing to the extractive labor that rendered possible this representation in the first place, as well as its burden.
The End: Photography’s Chemical Aftermath
Where Kriemann’s and Cariou’s works suggest Wall’s material/photographic prehistory, the notion of waste and residues opens the perspective of what happens when images perish. By concluding on that “after,” I want to transpose Wall’s photographic prehistory into a posthistory of sorts, through a video essay by the Swiss artist Alexandra Navratil. In Silbersee (2015), black-and-white photographs of a wastewater deposit for surrounding factories—which remains highly toxic to this day—tie in with poetic text (fig. 5). We see a grizzled landscape of industrial ruins with faint smokestacks in the background. The factories that used to dump their debris in the lake were film manufacturers, among them Agfa-Orwo, of the former East Germany, which enjoyed a monopoly on film production during the era of the GDR.55Silbersee is composed from a series of photographs taken by a chemist who worked at the factory and was obsessed with documenting the artificial lake, nicknamed “silver lake” by the locals, from which Silbersee borrows its title. The film fans out a dour palette of gray, white, and black hues. The images dissolve at a slow pace, blurring into one another, owing to a technical choice of a fade-in-out effect. Their dim hues contrast with the poem that runs over them in bright white letters. We are invited, silently, to read verses emerging from a crusty, mineralized world in the background of a low industrial hum: “My breath calcifies / I desiccate / I ossify / My past atomizes”; “My feet evaporate / I sink to the bottom / and am washed away”; “My legs pulverize / I turn into froth.”
Navratil leaves open the subject who speaks—Is it the lake, the waste, the chemist, the worker, the landscape? In these words, bodies, human and natural, seem to undergo transformations analogous to those of photography’s chemical composition and decomposition, rendering porous the boundaries between flesh and photographic film. Those same boundaries between inside (us) and outside (the environment) are reminiscent of Alaimo’s transcorporeality that we examined in Cariou’s mirrored-bitumen images. The transcorporeal status of photography, its material continuity in bodies and global flows of toxic materials, is exactly what is at stake in all the practices examined here. In asserting that continuity within the medium, Navratil conjures photography’s metabolism, moving between landscapes and bodies like the tired uranium lands, deftly evoking Wall’s processes of washing, bleaching, and dissolving as necessary conditions to the medium.
This metabolic aspect of photography is a nod to Karl Marx’s notion of “metabolic rifts,” through which he famously explained how increasingly industrialized human labor becomes alienated from its natural resources as the latter are gradually depleted under capitalism, notably through capitalist agricultural exploitation.56 I have tried to show how photography’s industrial labor, but also its industrial footprint, are likewise bound to patterns of systematic separation from the natural resources the medium originates. Yet finishing on the tentative notion of a metabolism of photography is not accidental. As work became managed according to energy flows, says Daggett, the goal became to “increase the metabolic rate” of the worker and the machine “by maximizing work and evacuating waste.”57 The sites where Cariou, Kriemann, and Navratil have taken us, however, thwart any illusion of a perfectly efficient photographic metabolism: photographic matter, taken out with extraction, disseminated in manufacturing centers and laboratories and left rotting in toxic ponds, troubles unflagging beliefs in the power of environmental images.
Through an engagement with specific materials—namely, uranium and bitumen—we have seen how photography’s dirty materialities are invariably founded upon dirty energy materialities. Cariou, Kriemann, and Navratil attune us to photography’s pre- and postmaterial histories to fend off the medium’s ability to conceal its energetic roots in light of photography’s long-standing relationship with environmental thought. These artists turn our attention from the illusory visions of postindustrial landscape images to the devices that produce them, to the materials used in these devices, and thus to the people who extract these same materials as well as to those who undergo resultant toxic afterlives. Inscribing themselves in a longer lineage of image making, Cariou, Kriemann, and Navratil invite us to revisit photography’s geochemical origins and contemplate images of pollution as a pollution of images.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the artists for generously providing images. I am grateful to Susanne Kriemann for our ongoing conversation and to Giacomo Mercuriali for our evolving dialogue on the environmental costs of digital image production.
Notes
On film, see Knowles, Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices; Litvintseva, Geological Filmmaking; Bozak, Cinematic Footprint. On photography, see Mintie, “Material Matters.”,Siobhan Angus’s Camera Geologica, which appeared in March 2024 when this article was at the proofs stage, also discusses the work of Warren Carriou and Susanne Kriemann, among others, and critiques discourses on photographic immateriality through an elemental approach. On photography’s material effects on the biosphere, see Kelsey, “Photography and the Ecological Imagination.” For a historical look at image circulation as energy circulation, see Mavrokordopoulou and Mercuriali, “Visual Heat”; Mavrokordopoulou and Mercuriali, “Hot Pictures.” The argument presented here extends research developed in my essay “Entrée en matière. Les autoradiographies de Fritz Goro pour Life.”
The show took place at George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York.
My ecological reading of Benjamin is informed by Bozak, Cinematic Footprint, 9.
Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v. “bitumen,” https://www.britannica.com/science/bitumen (accessed May 20, 2022).
The technical process that Niépce followed is recounted in detail at the website of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, which owns the picture: “The Niépce Photograph,” Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, https://www.hrc.utexas.edu/niepce-heliograph (accessed June 18, 2024).
“Petrography,” Warren Cariou (website), http://www.warrencariou.com/petrography (accessed May 20, 2022).
De Vos, “Protection and Reflection,” 612. Foil also serves as a protective barrier for people with environmental illness since it buffers toxicants, helping to keep at bay toxicity. It is this double feature that de Vos engages with. Incidentally, certain of Cariou’s images are also printed on aluminum plates.
Daggett, Birth of Energy, 4; my emphasis. Daggett borrows the term ruling from Karl Marx’s “ruling ideas” as a period’s ideas thought in material terms that he formulates in The German Ideology (1932).
Yusoff, “Mine as Paradigm.” Yusoff’s argument in this essay comes close to Lewis Mumford’s reflections on mines in Technics and Civilization, 69–71 (minus the accent on the racial aspect).
See Hecht, Being Nuclear, for a detailed analysis of the legal realities that marginalized the violence of uranium mining, what Gabrielle Hecht deems “a history of invisibility” (185). Pitchblende is the principal ore source for uranium.
The miners were not mining uranium then. Uranium was only discovered in 1789, and its radioactivity—in fact, radioactivity tout court—was not discovered until 1898. The miners were, however, working in ores that contained the mineral, and so they were exposed to radiotoxicity.
Film technology consultant Paul Read connects uranium salt recipes with the sepia tone of certain silent films. See Read, “‘Unnatural Colours,’” 18.
nv11543431C32Schnubel, Histoire naturelle de la radioactivité, 34. In her archives at the Musée Curie, Paris, multiple photographs show Curie at the mines of Joachimsthal (today Jachymov). Epistolary exchanges with the Union Minière du Haut Katanga, the company that later provided part of the uranium for the first atomic bomb from the Congo, attests to the deep ties of early radioactivity research with the mining industry.
Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact , 18.
This is also the image used in the introduction to a recent Radical History Review issue on photography and labor. Coleman, James, and Sharma, “Photography and Work,” 7.
Sekula, “Eternal Esthetics of Laborious Gestures,” 25. The caricature is also mentioned in Sekula, “Emerging Picture-Language,” 222.
Daggett, Birth of Energy, 90. Here she draws on historian Anson Rabinbach’s work on the utopian obsession with energy and fatigue in nineteenth-century labor organization.
The photographs are not the artist’s but originate from various state archives and mining companies.
This was not the first time Navratil tackled photographic materiality. Resurrections (2014) is a film around Agfa’s industrial connections to the gelatin silver process, the most commonly used chemical process in analog photography.
Marx introduces this in the third volume of Capital. For an introduction to “metabolic rifts” in contemporary ecological thought, see Moore, “Environmental Crises and the Metabolic Rift,” 125–29.
