"What Lies Beneath an Empire: Fertilizer and Photography"
Tuesday, February 11th, 4:45 PM
Goldwin Smith Hall G22
Abstract:
Two men stand atop a mountain of bones, resting a leg on an upright bison skull. Taken in 1892 at Michigan Carbon Works, this image has become emblematic of settler colonialism. In this talk, I resituate the photograph within the history of fertilizer to trace an environmental history of settler colonialism through the lens of soil and bones. Through the destructive distillation of bones, Michigan Carbon Works produced fertilizer, pigments, and gelatin. The late 19th-century demand for these products—essential to agriculture and the burgeoning photographic industry—intensified bone gathering on the Plains. Once transformed into Homestead Bone Black fertilizer, the bones were returned to the land, laying the groundwork for agricultural settlement. By examining the material and symbolic connections between the image and fertilizer, I ask: how does photography function as fertilizer in the context of settler colonialism?
Biography:
Siobhan Angus works at the intersections of art history, media studies, and the environmental humanities. Her current research explores the visual culture of resource extraction with a focus on materiality, labor, and environmental justice. Angus is an assistant professor of Media Studies at Carleton University. She is the author of Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke University Press 2024) which was awarded the 2024 Photography Network Book Prize and her research has been published in Environmental Humanities, liquid blackness, and October.
