VIRTUAL: Photography and the Contaminated Atmosphere: Representation and Materiality in the Industrial Landscape

Wednesday, October 13 | 5:30 pm

Siobhan Angus, Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art/Visiting Scholar, Yale Center for British Art and 2020-2021 William H. Helfand Visual Culture Fellow Sponsored by the Visual Culture Program

To explore photography’s chemical and material history, this talk examines the materiality and meaning of 19th-century iron and silver-based photographs that document and celebrate industrial growth in Pennsylvania, particularly railroads and steel mills. By placing these photographs, including platinum, cyanotype, and albumen prints, as well as stereographs in dialogue with each other, the ways that artists have documented transformations to the landscape in the past is reconsidered in terms of the rapid pace of current environmental degradation. Questions of how photography was used to respond to, and express social, emotional, or political perceptions of land, and how these meanings have changed in the 21st-century from an increasing awareness about the human impact affecting climate change will be explored.

Siobhan Angus specializes in the history of photography and the environmental humanities. Her current research explores the visual culture of resource extraction with a focus on materiality, perceptions of nature, and environmental justice. She is currently a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art and a visiting scholar at the Yale Center for British Art. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Visual Culture from York University. Her research has been published in Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, Radical History Review, and Capitalism and the Camera (Verso, 2021) and is forthcoming in Geohumanities and October. She is a co-editor of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Literature, Culture, a member of the Executive Committee of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC), and a board member of the Workers Arts and Heritage Center. Her research has been supported by the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, the Science History Institute,  and the Paul Mellon Centre.

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