Swiss Camera Museum. Mining Photography

Is Photography polluting? Featuring historical photographs, contemporary artistic works, as well as interviews with restorers, geologists and climate researchers, the exhibition tells, in a radically new perspective, the story of photography as an industrial process, showing how deeply this medium has been linked to climate change.

Since its invention, photography has depended on the global extraction and exploitation of natural resources. In the early 19th century, these included salt, fossil fuels such as bitumen and carbon, as well as copper and silver. By the end of the 20th century, the photographic industry was one of the largest consumers of silver, responsible at its peak for more than half of the world's consumption of this metal.

Today, with the rise of digital photography and the ubiquity of mobile devices, image production depends on rare elements and metals such as coltan, cobalt, and europium. Storage and distribution of images also consume immense amounts of energy. Today, Americans produce more photographs every two minutes than they did throughout the entire 19th century.

An exhibition by the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg.

MINING PHOTOGRAPHY

THE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT OF IMAGE PRODUCTION 

13 FEBRUARY–8 JUNE 2025 

SWISS CAMERA MUSEUM | VEVEY, SWITZERLAND

On the cover: © Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio (Lauren Bon, Tristan Duke and Richard Nielsen), Lake Bed Developing Process, 2013

Source: Show On Show