Crimson Soil

October

with Jennifer Raab

On July 4, 2020, Donald Trump’s proposal for a “National Garden of American Heroes” at Mount Rushmore framed national memory as something that can be fixed in soil. Against this, the article reads W.E.B. Du Bois’s account of Georgia’s “crimson soil” as a counter-archive in which land records settler expansion, slavery, and racial violence rather than stable national foundations.

Church’s Icebergs in the Age of Telegraphy

Frederic Church: Global Artist. Yale University Press, 2026.

This chapter examines Frederic Church’s The Icebergs (1861) alongside the emergence of transatlantic telegraphy. Situating the painting within Cyrus Field’s efforts to connect Europe and North America, it argues that Church’s polar landscapes engage with the same questions of distance, communication, and control that shaped new global communication infrastructures. Through its monumental scale and attention to the unstable materiality of ice, The Icebergs reveals both the ambition to render the world knowable and the enduring resistance of natural forces to human mastery.

Porous Surfaces Hands, Chemicals, and the Material Lives of Photographs

rekto:verso

In her new book Entropic Records, artist en researcher Pauline Hafsia M’barek engages with photographs from the AGFA advertising archive at Museum Ludwig in Cologne. AGFA, a German chemical company, was among the world’s leading producers of photographic film and lab equipment for many decades. In this book review, writer and historian of photography Siobhan Angus invites readers to approach photography as a tactile, fragile surface shaped by hands, labour, chemistry and time. 

Ansel Adams at Union Carbide: Extractive Capitalism’s Wellsian Worlds

American Art

In 1941, Ansel Adams photographed the Union Carbide chemicals company factory for Fortune magazine, presenting the petrochemical plant as a futuristic “Wellsian World.” However, a materials-driven analysis reveals both representational and material connections between the photographs and the chemicals industry. Adams’s work illuminates the connections between photography and capitalism by revealing the complex network linking metal and hydrocarbon extraction, their refinement into alloys and chemicals, and photography’s dependence on the chemicals sector.