Visual Culture

Abstract This review of the year’s work in visual culture in 2024 is structured around the theme of capitalist extraction, which generates three broad questions. How is visual culture implicated in regimes of extraction? Second, how does visual culture contribute to these practices? Third, how might visual cultural objects and practices challenge and combat the resource aesthetics of extractivist capitalism? To address such questions, this review is divided into six sections, beginning with an introduction to the intersections of visual culture and global systems of capitalist extraction. The second section explores the conceptual and methodological grounding provided by Priya Jaikumar and Lee Grieveson’s introduction to Media+Environment’s special issue on the extractive film. The third extends such grounding into a discussion of Siobhan Angus’s Camera Geologica, which situates photography in global regimes of materiality, mining, and labour. The fourth section discusses Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, a text that historically situates visual culture in capitalist political economy and considers how a style obsessed with presence has come to dominate in the political economy of globalized capitalism. The question of visual culture’s active participation in extraction is discussed next, with recourse to Kathryn Yusoff’s Geologic Life and Theo Reeves-Evison’s ‘On Prospecting’. The final section surveys how all these contributions theorize ways for visual culture to challenge its implication and participation in global systems of extraction.