Art historian. Writing about photography, resource extraction, & environmental justice. Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke UP 2024) https://www.dukeupress.edu/camera-geologica
1,683 followers 1,524 following 44 posts
view profile on Bluesky 
"Whatever nuance is needed for its interception, resisting AI’s further creep into intellectual labor will also require blunt-force militancy. The steps are simple. Don’t publish AI bullshit. Don’t even publish mealymouthed essays about the temptation to produce AI bullshit."
www.vanityfair.com/news/story/c...
The fact that Matthew Dowd lost his job for pointing out Charlie Kirk’s hate speech, while Brian Kilmeade openly suggests we should euthanize the homeless and there is zero outrage, shows exactly what is terribly wrong with today’s political mainstream media.
“the budgetary crisis unfolding across the sector has not meant the cancellation of the capital projects (of which many are too far along to cancel without incurring massive costs) but the culling of educators and staff—10,000 in the college sector alone—and the cancellation of hundreds of programs”
Less than 20% Inuit employment and a nine year life span for the mine. I hope the royalties are good… www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
“I believe the world we want starts at this moment, not tomorrow. It is being created by every single act, every decision, we make.”
It’s not a matter of choosing between nuclear and ground water. You could also choose to regulate AI, stop asserting its “inevitability” everywhere from primary school to the SSA, and minimize the need for such energy-intensive infrastructure
It’s really real! Exciting to see The Price of Gold in print. Pre-order yours today! @mcgillqueensup.bsky.social
Look at this graph. The share of national income going to the richest 10 percent was lowest (and share to lower 90 percent highest) when union membership was at its highest. As unions have weakened, inequality has widened. This is why we must build back union power.
"Mamdani’s proposal to open 5 city-run grocery stores has industry execs — + other political foes — clutching their pearls. Critics call it a socialist fantasy. But publicly owned grocery stores already exist, serving > a million Americans every day, with prices 25-30% ⬇️ than conventional retail."
i find this image so fascinating. it is both a literal example of authoritarianism but also a second-hand reproduction of the aesthetics of other authoritarian states. it's like a simulacra of authoritarianism whose purpose is to attempt to make the simulacra real.
Final days to get your abstracts in for this very timely conference exploring the ethical, political, and environmental stakes of minerals. See more details here: imperialminerals.ie/events/criti...
Ottawa folks - join me and Rachelle Dickenson next Thursday at the Global Centre for Pluralism to talk about 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘯 𝘈𝘳𝘵! I'm thrilled to be hosted by Carleton Centre for Public History (@cupublichistory.bsky.social) & the Embassy of Mexico in Canada. Details here: tinyurl.com/ottawabookla...
"If our leaders will not remember that history, workers will. The flight attendants have reminded us of a truth as old as Canada’s wartime strikes: when the system refuses fairness, defiance is democracy."
“During the course of the 26-day sit-in, the Black Panther Party played a leading support role in providing food for the demonstrators. Over and over again, the disabled protesters credited the BPP with literally sustaining their struggle, “keeping us alive body and soul,” as one person put it.”
‘Thanks to journalists such as Anas al-Sharif and his colleagues who risked their lives, for over six hundred days the genocide has been live-streamed for the world to see. And yet we are told we must wait for the experts.’ Stefan Tarnowski on Gaza and the media: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/au...
Read this fascinating new blog post by @gigitang.bsky.social examining a petition written by the Chinese digger, Jong Ah Siug, from the asylum in colonial Melbourne. The petition takes the form of a palm-sized bound book and includes hand-drawn maps. imperialminerals.ie/2025/08/18/a...
“The White House plans to conduct a far-reaching review of Smithsonian museum exhibitions, materials and operations ahead of America’s 250th anniversary to ensure the museums align with President Trump’s interpretation of American history.”
They want people to delete their personal photos so there's enough water to allow people to continue making AI slop images
How did 3M’s “forever chemicals” end up in all of us? The inside story of the corporate scientists who discovered—then helped to conceal—the dangers of its chemicals.
LOSING MY MIND, they KNEW the soil was so arsenic contaminated that originally rice COULDN'T GROW. So they developed a strain of rice that could grow and it made them suck up even more poison from the soil www.nature.com/news/2005/05...
Truly honored by this thoughtful in-depth review of Camera Geologica by Matthew Himley and Albert Stabler in Afterimage. Grateful for the close read and reflection online.ucpress.edu/afterimage/a...
Despite intense backlash from environmentalists and Indigenous rights holders, Carney got his way on the expedited major projects bill. @natashabulowski.bsky.social has been all over this file. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/06/20/n...
Important news for the #envhist crowd: We are hiring an Associate Professor of Environmental History! www.jobbnorge.no/en/available... Application deadline is August 7. Some tips for those interested from abroad in thread 👇
Love this film!
If you use AI you’re accelerating climate crisis, polluting deprived communities, burning through water, giving bosses excuses to reduce workers rights and wages. It’s a moral and ethical degradation.
What an honor to speak about technology, materials, and labor at the Creative Convening for "The New Art: American Photography, 1839–1910" at The Met. The exhibition runs through July 20 and I can't recommend it enough! You can watch the whole event here: www.youtube.com/live/6Clotse...
“the way technology changes work is neither automatic nor inevitable. It is shaped by collective choices about what kinds of work, and what kinds of working lives, society is willing to sustain.”
I’m really looking forward to participating in this Creative Convening at The Met this Saturday, connected the brilliant exhibition ‘The New Art: American Photography, 1839–1910.’ I’ll be talking about technology, materials, and the fantasy of work without workers
One week ago we descended on Hamilton for #CHESS2025 and explored the themes of industrial contamination, collapse, and renewal. Special thanks to our executive member @historiamagoria.bsky.social and @kcruikshank.bsky.social, as well as @siobhanangus.bsky.social for a fabulous keynote! #envhist
In "Negative Originals," Juanita Solano Roa explores race and identity through photographic practices in late nineteenth-century Medellín, Colombia. Read the introduction for free on our website now! #VisualCulture #Photography buff.ly/TmxT1uo
Thank you so much Samira!! I also really enjoyed your workshop - I’m sorry we didn’t get more of a chance to talk!
#CHESS2025 kicked off with a fascinating and engaging keynote by Siobhan Angus @siobhanangus.bsky.social on Shadow Geologies: Photography in the Aftermath of Mining. 🔹 Our Canadian History of the Environment Summer Symposium continues tomorrow with a full slate of activities around Hamilton!
Tomorrow!
ICYMI: If you are in and around Hamilton on May 30th, join us for our #CHESS2025 keynote address, Shadow Geologies: Photography in the Aftermath of Mining with @siobhanangus.bsky.social! 4:30pm EDT – Alumni Memorial Hall, Great Hall – McMaster University niche-canada.org/2025/05/17/e... #envhist
This is an excellent article on the energy usage of so-called AI both now and in the near future. And what they show is that the rush to AI basically promises to undo nearly all of the progress we've made towards reducing the impacts of climate change.
Great example of how data generated by algorithms can look correct, yet is largely false. With no on-the-ground truthing steps, this kind of thing will continue to happen. Policymakers and policy advocates need to understand the limitations of creating data sets like this.
say it again: 4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities ROI for NIH and NSF for local economies is conservatively 4x, often close to 10x demolishing higher education is economic sabotage
Professors use AI to produce lectures and to grade. Students use it to write papers. At a certain point, someone will cut out the middle man. But who is the middle man? Student? Professor? Or Higher Ed itself? www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/t...
Really looking forward to this today 🙌
This is tonight and looks great! Unfortunately I can’t go as we have Yannis Tzioumakis’s inaugural professorial lecture in Liverpool. Which I am also looking forward to… but I wish I could do both.
not just a climate pope, but an all caps petition sharing climate pope
"What trillion-dollar problem is AI trying to solve?" Wages. They're trying to use it to solve having to pay wages.
“Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate…Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.”
On “the subterranean relationship between mindfulness and paranoia.” Some “date the emergence of conspirituality as an Internet phenomenon to the mid-1990s, but the links between America’s conspiratorial right and the left-coded New Age and health and wellness cultures go back much further”
Join us on the 27 May, 5-6.30pm (GMT) for the next event in the Photoecologies online seminar series: Siobhan Angus & Jennifer Raab: Cultivating Empire: Photography and Fertilizer To attend, please register via our Eventbrite page: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/siobhan-an...
Check out @siobhanangus.bsky.social's review of Stephen Porder's "Elemental: How Five Elements Changed Earth’s Past and Will Shape Our Future," published in 2023 by @princetonupress.bsky.social; review now available @hnetreviews.bsky.social #envhist #energy #envhum www.h-net.org/reviews/show...
One thing I'm deducing from the whole "eat like great-grandma did" discourse is that The Jungle fell off the high school syllabus at some point and we should put it back.
I'm really looking forward to being back in London for the Cosgrove Lecture at Royal Holloway’s Centre for the GeoHumanities. I’ll be exploring themes around mining, gelatin, environmental remediation, and what remains after mining. May 12 at 5:30pm! www.royalholloway.ac.uk/research-and...
Heartened to see that close to 900 fellow academics and educators have already signed our letter in support of trans rights, trans wellbeing & trans inclusion, and against essentialist, anti-scientific, racialised & regressive views of womanhood. Please do read, share & sign! tinyurl.com/mud7va29
Please join us on the 29 April, 5-6.30pm (GMT) for the next session in the Photoecologies online seminar series: Esther Leslie: Eyeless with Devices - On Digitised Seeing and Unseeing To attend the talk, please register via our eventbrite page: www.eventbrite.com/e/esther-les...
met this thing for the very first time yesterday at @peoplesbooktakoma.com— a weird feeling, truthfully, to see eight years of your life condensed into a 1-pound stack of paper. But it is very pretty & I hope some of you guys like it 🌿
14 authors and artists explore how wind shapes experience, reasoning, artistic, and knowledge production, covering military technology, volumetric poetry, a libretto, animacies, aesthetics, diffraction, environmental perception, risk communication, indigenous cosmologies, and energy infrastructure.
I just finished this by @siobhanangus.bsky.social, please all read it so we can talk about it. It's insightful and thought provoking and hits many of my interests (material-led histories of media, science, exploration and extraction). Now mentally curating the exhibition of the book...
This is so kind but I’m glad it resonated with you! 🙏 happy to talk material histories and extraction anytime!
I have a book cover! Cover image is by Wolfgang Suschitzky of a woman jumping a puddle on Charing Cross Rd in 1937. Cover b/w and silver. Details of book now on @uchicagopress.bsky.social at press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
What do these corporations have in common? Netflix Ford Tesla T-Mobile Duke Energy DISH Network Metlife Dominion Energy United States Steel In recent years, they all paid their execs more than they paid in taxes. This is what a corporate-rigged system looks like.
I'm currently reading the excellent Camera Geologica by @siobhanangus.bsky.social - I'm asking similar questions about minerals in media tech. I'm half way through a chapter about silver, and the sheer quantity of silver mined and used historically by the photography industry is mind boggling!
This piece from @tressiemcphd.bsky.social starts with a bang and just gets better and better. Gift link.
"Using 📸 lenses made of Arctic ice, Tristan Duke's ongoing, experimental photo prjct, Glacial Optics, explores... climate crisis... By laying 🧊 core samples directly on large sheets of photo paper, Duke created photograms, [translating the] 🧊 lens into formal studies of light moving through 🧊."
*Job Claxon*: we're hiring a Postdoc to research the Colonial History of the Botanic Gardens at Universiteit Utrecht. www.uu.nl/en/organisat... #skystorians #jobs #histofscience #colonialhistory #botanicalgardens
Looking forward to presenting as part of a speakers series on art, technology, and the environment at Boise State. Tomorrow at 12pm MST.
It's such an honor to be nominated for ASLE's Scholar of the Month. ASLE has been such an important organization for the development of my work and the field more broadly. (the Q&A features a shoutout to the brilliant and generous @jessvarner.bsky.social)
Ottawa folks, I'll be giving at talk in the Art + Architectural History Public Talks series tomorrow at 11:30am. Hope to see some of you there! carleton.ca/aah/cu-event...
Today is the day! Take a look at the CFP for the 2026 Biennial Conference of The Society of 19th-Century Americanists: UNDERGROUND www.c19society.org/2026-confere... The Conference website will go up at the end of April / early May, and submissions will be due Sept 5th.
What a fascinating talk by @michellehenning.bsky.social, linking photography to chemical warfare via Benjamin's aura & Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia. Really looking forward to Henning's forthcoming book A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog, and Empire press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
Ever wondered what museum workers really think about their institution's financial precarity and funding ethics? Samantha Summers and I asked them - and we've compiled compelling results in this new peer-reviewed article: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Gorgeous! I can’t wait to read it
It was such a pleasure to participate in the HTC Forum at MIT- what a great discussion!
Kirsty Robertson on this recently uncovered 1966 photograph of Eva Hesse washing wire, coated in asbestos, in a bathtub, part of the production of her work “Metronomic Irregularity” at #caa113. Part of @siobhanangus.bsky.social and Kevin Hong’s excellent panel “Chemical Intimacies”
You are invited to the Photoecologies Study Group, a new space for exploring photography as an environmental, elemental and energetic assemblage. To find out more about and register to attend our upcoming events, see our eventbrite page: www.eventbrite.com/o/photoecolo... .
Are you an #envhum scholar looking to make a difference for the field? Become a co-editor of the journal Environmental Humanities! We need a new set of 2 co-editors to replace Franklin & I from Jan 2026. See the call here: environmentalhumanities.org Contact us if you have any questions.
Thank you for sharing the short film -- it's really compelling. I'm also quite interested in deindustrialization so I'm excited to see how the photo project shapes up.
Oh that’s too bad - it would be great to see you!
Next Tuesday at Cornell! This is the first talk from a project on the visual culture of fertilizer extraction (a collaboration w/ Jenny Raab), which turns to bones, guano, and coral to think through American expansionism and settler colonialism both above and below ground
Oh, I'm so happy to hear that. Your project sounds fascinating--Asbestos is such an important case study. Please keep me posted re: the project. I'd be very interested to see the final result.
Just out! Time Machines: Telegraphic Images in Nineteenth-Century France mitpress.mit.edu/978026204918...
Doug Ford is corrupt af and destroying the public infrastructure of this province, on Feb 27 we have to vote him OUT #onpoli
This book looks fascinating. ✨
Oh that’s so nice to hear-thank you!!
Our editor-in-chief, @jessicamdewitt.bsky.social, chose "Collaboration and Hope in 'Tar Remedies'" by @siobhanangus.bsky.social and Warren Cariou as our Editor's Pick last month! niche-canada.org/2024/11/05/c... #envhum #envhist
What a gift to be in dialogue with Abraham Oghobase on photography and extraction for the 2025 Goldfarb Lecture in Visual Art at York University, chaired by Sarah Parsons
I'm looking forward to being in conversation with Abraham Oghobase on the theme of Extraction and Photography for the 2025 Goldfarb Lecture in Visual Art at York University. Toronto folks, I hope to see you there! events.yorku.ca/events/goldf...
Interesting call for papers from the British Library, English Heritage, and Kew 🗃️ 'Gardens and Empires', deadline 17 February gardensandempires.tiiny.site
With literally minutes left in his presidency, Joe Biden has granted clemency to Leonard Peltier
You’ll probably see this screenshot floating around a lot but it really was wonderful to see Lynch put a scene in Twin Peaks: The Return where he has his character literally stare at the camera and say that you should either support trans people or die. I needed to hear that in 2017
Join @siobhanangus.bsky.social, @jarrodhore.bsky.social with Andrew Seaton @uclhistory.bsky.social & @anthropoceneucl.bsky.social for this conversation on 'images of extraction' Weds 22 January 1500 GMT.
57 companies are responsible for 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions since 2016. These companies include fossil fuel giants like Chevron, Shell, and BP, who have been raking in record profits. The profits of Big Oil should not be more important than the future of our planet.
As we witness these heartbreaking scenes from the fires in LA, an important reminder that incarcerated people make up over 30% of California’s forest firefighters.
Perhaps the most important factor: all neon glass is bent by hand. It cannot be mechanically produced. This requirement for human skill, artistry, and time is both a reason to admire neon, and a reason why those driven only by short-term motives are compelled by LED.
“A single black tea with tapioca pearls from Boba Guys contains more BPA than a person can safely consume in a year” and other brands are no safer. This report is going to rock Bay Area teen culture sfstandard.com/2024/12/28/b...
Santa Maria area farm workers bent over harvesting strawberries. They share this time of year is very hard for them. The season's winding up and there is little other work in the area. They are trying to work as many hours as they can to pay their bills. #WeFeedYou
ICYMI: Check out this special issue of Mobilizing Museum Minerals on Mobilizing Museum Minerals. It's open-access!! niche-canada.org/2024/12/16/s... #envhist #nathist #histsci #museums
Many thanks to @siobhanangus.bsky.social for her brilliant new book, Camera Geologica. Who knew, for example, that "cattle who consumed mustard seed metabolized a sulfuric substance, enhancing the light sensitivity of silver halides and enabling better film speeds"? I highly recommend her work.
Thank you, Tim! I’m so glad you enjoyed it and appreciate this generous post!