Photography and the Extractive Gaze: Visual culture and natural resource extraction on the Canadian Shield, 1900-1930
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the Anthropocene is a relatively new concept, communities in extractive zones have already experienced the transformations, changes, and destruction brought by human activity and industrial development. Through archival research, my dissertation investigates how vernacular and survey photographs of mining from the early 20th century circulated to promote and occasionally challenge resource extraction. Taking as its case study the Timiskaming region on the Precambrian shield, I explore how photography chronicled the transformation of territory under extractive capitalism as photographs invited viewers to envision new futures, where commerce and art would come together to drive economic and industrial development. These archival photographs formed a site of knowledge production that shaped how people in the early 20th century understood industrial development. I situate contemporary experiences of climate change within these longer historical trajectories to trace the social and environmental legacies of resource extraction. Once extracted from the earth, raw natural resources are transformed into consumer goods, which bear little evidence of the complex networks of human and non-human labour that brought them into being. Environmental art historians have addressed this disconnect by examining how human cultural production has unfolded within a broader ecological context, challenging the separation of art from the natural world. This dissertation makes a material link between silver and photography during a period where the demand for silver bullion exploded due to the rise of amateur photography. My research identifies connections between photographic technologies, visual form, and political activism. I conclude that photography can bring the often-invisible processes of extraction into view and document the historical production of environmental trauma. I read the histories that the archival photographs contain, and the histories that were foreclosed, as documents that can teach us something about hope, healing, and living in the Anthropocene.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".