Slow Violence, Photographic Technology, and the Extractive Industry in the Amazon

• In Event: ¿Nuestra Amazonía?: Mediated Claims to Ownership and Belonging in Amazonian Studies

Abstract

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Amazonian rubber boom triggered the production of varied narratives and images of the violent inclusion of Amazonian nature and people into global capitalist networks. In this paper, I examine the tight link between social exploitation, environmental damage, and technology in the archives of travelers who photographed the transformations triggered by the rubber industry in the region, such as British Consul Roger Casement’s photographs of the abuses committed by Peruvian Amazon Company in the Putumayo, American photographer Dana Merrill’s documentation of the construction of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad, and Brazilian modernist artist Mario de Andrade’s images of Amazonian towns after the decline of the rubber trade. The development of modern visual technologies, and their use to represent ‘remote’ regions like the Amazon to an urban audience, has often been explained as part of modernity’s search for immediacy, resulting in a compression of our experience of time and space. Departing from Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence,” I explore a different temporal understanding of photography, one that addresses the slow sedimentation of time in the midst of human and non-human agents. I address how technological culture has relied on a multiplicity of ways of registering time through a reading of these photographs that extends from the social and human history of modernization and its ruins to what lies inscribed in the ground, the water,and the photographic film: traces of dead and scarred bodies and trees, displaced peoples, migrant labor, or eroded river banks.

Author

• Carolina Sá Carvalho, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC)