Photography and the Extractive Gaze: Visual culture and natural resource extraction on the Canadian Shield, 1900-1930

Abstract

While the Anthropocene is a relatively new concept, communities in extractive zones have already experienced the transformations, changes, and destruction brought by human activity and industrial development. Through archival research, my dissertation investigates how vernacular and survey photographs of mining from the early 20th century circulated to promote and occasionally challenge resource extraction. Taking as its case study the Timiskaming region on the Precambrian shield, I explore how photography chronicled the transformation of territory under extractive capitalism as photographs invited viewers to envision new futures, where commerce and art would come together to drive economic and industrial development. These archival photographs formed a site of knowledge production that shaped how people in the early 20th century understood industrial development. I situate contemporary experiences of climate change within these longer historical trajectories to trace the social and environmental legacies of resource extraction.

Once extracted from the earth, raw natural resources are transformed into consumer goods, which bear little evidence of the complex networks of human and non-human labour that brought them into being. Environmental art historians have addressed this disconnect by examining how human cultural production has unfolded within a broader ecological context, challenging the separation of art from the natural world. This dissertation makes a material link between silver and photography during a period where the demand for silver bullion exploded due to the rise of amateur photography. My research identifies connections between photographic technologies, visual form, and political activism. I conclude that photography can bring the often-invisible processes of extraction into view and document the historical production of environmental trauma. I read the histories that the archival photographs contain, and the histories that were foreclosed, as documents that can teach us something about hope, healing, and living in the Anthropocene.