Extraction’s Visual Cultures: Workshopping Media, Materiality, and Methods

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

Since the first Environmental History “Gallery Essays” in the 2000s, environmental historians have productively analyzed the power of images in shaping environmental processes (c.f. Miller 2003; Dunaway 2008, 2015; Pritchard 2017; Benson 2020; Jørgensen 2023). Landscape historians, art historians, architectural historians, and cultural geographers have likewise developed and applied methods for visual studies of the environment (c.f. Cosgrove & Daniels 1988; Bleichmar 2012; Demos 2018; Dümpelmann 2019). Yet, the recent observation of former EH Gallery editor Cindy Ott still largely holds true: “Historians often handle images as unobstructed windows, not sources with vantage points in their own right” (Ott 2021).

As humanity confronts extractivism’s ongoing harm, scholars must move beyond the treatment of images as mere evidence of environmental change to interrogate how they have been products and parts of extractive regimes. Building upon the work of scholars who have helped us to understand imagery’s power in resource extraction (Montaño 2022; Nye 1985; Jaune Quick-to-See Smith 2000), this roundtable seeks to foster a methodological dialogue around how extraction’s visual artifacts are analyzed in inventive ways. Each contributor, trained in one or more fields traditionally engaged in visual/landscape studies, will address a different medium—drawing, photography, exhibitions, painting—and a different extraction process—mining coal; harvesting hay; draining water; accumulating slag waste—to ask: What do visual studies methods add to environmental histories of extraction? What are these methods’ limitations? Have certain political economies and geographies of extraction coincided with particular “scopic regimes” or ways of seeing and depicting the earth’s resources (Jay 1988)?

The roundtable is designed for scholars interested in extraction’s material evidence, who desire to make central human and biotic relations with extractivism, and who methodologically aim to realize post-extractive futures.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Chair

• Dolly Jørgensen, University of Stavanger

Moderator

• Dolly Jørgensen, University of Stavanger

Presenters

• Tobah Aukland-Peck, The Graduate Center, CUNY

• Charlotte Leib, Yale University

• Teresa Montoya, University of Chicago

• Pollyanna Rhee, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• Jessica Ann Varner, ACLS/Getty Fellow in the History of Art