Capital, earth, and image: Photography in India’s mining landscapes

How does photography materialize a mine? This article examines photography and film in India’s coalfields from 1900 to the present. The visual objects discussed include a diary from a colonial mining firm produced in 1906, a photo album sent to the early postcolonial Ministry for Industry and Supply in 1948, and a documentary film on displacement for open-cast coal mining in the 2010s. This article argues for an interpretive framework of mining photography that looks beyond fixed visual identifications of what counts as a “mine,” and instead uses photographic archives to trace the changing spatial relations between nature, labor, and capital that have defined extractive technologies in specific historical moments. The article follows photographic representations of mining from the labor-intensive, vertical forms of coal extraction that characterized the late colonial period to the late twentieth-century rise of mechanized open-cast or surface mining. This material transformation in mining practice maps onto a shift in photographic form, in which mining photography moves from thematizing social questions concerning labor and industrial capitalism to a visual language for representing the ecological crises of the present. This visual language is expressed through now widely circulating images of open-cast mining environments depicted as scalar representations for the destruction of the planet.