None More Black: Photography, Horror and ‘Black Ecology’ in Extractive Appalachia

• In Event: Doing Visual Criminology: New Empirical and Theoretical Directions

Abstract

‘Black’, as a color, concept, and communicative device is ubiquitous in visual depictions of rural landscapes, mountain isolation, and horror. Similarly, ‘the mountain’ has long been seen as a dark geographic space often imbued with supernatural powers and mystic cosmological origins. Drawing on geography and visual and green-cultural criminologies, this paper engages with the historical visual development—through pigment, film, and photography—of Appalachian mountain rurality as ‘dark emptiness’, examining and describing the philosophical, political and cultural relations between environmental blackness and extractive Appalachian ecology. Following Thacker’s ‘philosophy of horror’ and Bryant’s ‘black ecology’, this work examines the visual and philosophical connections between blackness and the anti-idyllic horror of the rural and extractive Appalachian landscape. Taking photography, painting, film, and recent technological developments in nano-pigmentation as the primary sites of inquiry and meaning, this paper highlights the ways that the historical and contemporary use and development of blackness as a visual device to illustrate rural isolation and its attendant horror both follow and inform the cultural and political meaning and power of ‘the mountain’ in extractive Appalachia.

Author

• Bill McClanahan, University of Essex