Call for Papers: CAA 2023 Annual Conference
William Gillen (active 1885-1897), The Great Chicago Cripple Creek Tunnel, Colo. Oct. 3rd. 93, 700 ft. Underground
THE ART OF REMOVAL: PHOTOGRAPHY AND NATURAL RESOURCE EXTRACTION
CAA 2023 Annual Conference, New York, NY, February 15–18, 2023 Photography Network sponsored session
This panel examines photography’s relationship to resource extraction, exploring how photographers have been variously boosters of and activists against the widespread harvesting of oil, gas, water, wood, rocks, and minerals. Encompassing a wide range of examples, from nineteenth-century images of deforestation to contemporary depictions of open-pit “mega mines,” it offers insights into photography’s evolving but ever entangled relationship with extractive industries.
Session papers may address questions including:
What are the photographic strategies that have been used to convey abundance, depletion, nature, humanity, and technology?
When has photography supported colonizing and capitalist ideas of resource ownership, and when has it provided sites of survival and resistance?
What is the relationship between environmental degradation and human exploitation in images of drilling, mining, lumbering, and even hunting and fishing?
When depicting the extraction of natural resources, how have photographers deployed or resisted traditional ideas of beauty and sublimity?
How has photography contended with non-visual facets of these processes, from slow-revealing consequences to "invisible” commodities like natural gas?
Papers should engage critically with photographic concepts and practices, considering works’ agendas, circulations, efficacies, co-optations, and social histories. Global perspectives are encouraged, as are papers centering Indigenous communities and/or informed by queer, critical race, feminist, post-colonial, and eco-critical methodologies.
Field of Study:
Media: Photography (history and studio)
Topics: Environmental Art
Field: Art History
Theory / Practice: Multidisciplinary
Time Period: Survey
Chair:Kristen Gaylord, Amon Carter Museum of American Art - kristeng@cartermuseum.org
CONTACT DETAILS:
Kristen Gaylord, PhD (she/her/hers)
Associate Curator of Photographs
Amon Carter Museum of American Art
3501 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth, TX 76107
kristeng@cartermuseum.org | 817.989.5096
cartermuseum.org