This 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, the lecture will 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, labour, 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 been published in Environmental Humanities, liquid blackness, and October.
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