Join Michelle Henning and Sarah James to discuss questions about the relationship between the ways in which photography pictures the world, the materials from which it is made, and its relationship to polluting and extractive industries.

Focussing on chemical photography in the interwar period, Michelle Henning’s book “A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog and Empire” addresses how photographic practice was linked to British imperial ideas about weather, climate and racial superiority; photography’s dependence on coal; how the polluted atmosphere (fog) came to represent particular ideas about imperial London, and how at the same time, photographic materials had a sensitivity to atmospheric change and contamination that went beyond the sensitivities assigned to them by the industry.

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