Agentic Metallurgy: Geological Agency in Contemporary Analogue Photography

This thesis emerges as a response to three challenges that have arisen within contemporary photography in recent years. Firstly, the renewed interest in photography’s materiality and early analogue photographic techniques following the digital dematerialisation of the photograph. Contemporary artists — such as Runo Lagomarsino, Warren Cariou, Joyce Campbell, and Anaïs Tondeur — are approaching the photographic process as a distinct medium in a manner akin to that of its earliest practitioners: as emerging from metallurgical and chemical interactions of light sensitive materials. Secondly, the rise of ‘new materialisms’ which (driven by the challenges posed by the current geological era of the Anthropocene) seek to reconceptualise matter as agentic, placing humans within a profoundly relational world in which they interact with, rather than act upon, other nonhuman entities. Extracted materials and metals have been essential to photography since its emergence in the nineteenth century, generally approached as inert matter which can be correctly formed to produce an image that replicates human vision. Contemporary analogue photography practices break from this focus on representationalism, engaging collaborative methodologies which displace the photographer as the singular agency responsible for the creation of a photograph. Thirdly, the issues of representation posed by the Anthropocene; how to convey its scales and histories with means of visualisation that have necessarily emerged from (and remain entangled in) anthropogenic ideology and extractivism. This thesis suggests that the returned interest in analogue photography by many contemporary artists does not result from nostalgia (as is commonly suggested) but is rather an effort to grapple with the histories and agencies that characterise the geologic period of the Anthropocene. This thesis approaches analogue photography as an inherently collaborative practice which, reliant on the contribution of nonhuman materials, can de-center the myopic human eye the medium has long been used to support. Through the materials silver, bitumen, iron, and uranium, Agentic Metallurgy: Geological Agency in Contemporary Analogue Photography presents the medium as a means of nonhuman collaboration, capable of offering an embodied and relational way of visualising or evidencing the histories, sites, and impacts of extractivism.