Infrastructures of Light
Tropicapitalism and Germaine Krull’s Camera
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12910667 |
|---|---|
| Authors | William Fysh (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 175-196 |
| Publication date | 2020-04-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Photography and Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1751-4517 • E-ISSN: 1751-4525 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17514517.2020.1754657 |
| OpenAlex | W3024809443 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 20 |
To understand the relationship between the camera and colonial capitalism, we must consider photography not just as a tool but as an infrastructural system, the very grounds upon which movements of goods, capital and ideas can be sustained, regulated, and interrupted. Focusing on French-Dutch-German photographer Germaine Krull, this article examines how the development of photographic infrastructures in mid-twentieth century Paris and Equatorial Africa both created and foiled networks for distributing fantasies of colonial development. Photographic infrastructures enabled the whiting out of racialized labor, the recasting of rubber, coffee and gold as the currency of freedom during WWII, and the refining of seemingly limitless resources of African light into image-objects. In the service of colonial fantasy, however, Krull’s photography was an unwittingly “dodgy” infrastructure, bringing to light a series of interruptions, decelerations and breakdowns in the resource networks purporting to insulate the French empire from the dangers of world war and propel imperial subjects and citizens into a future of colonial progress. The history of Krull’s “dodgy” photographic infrastructure therefore reveals pathways to undoing colonial capitalism from within, showing how deliberate photographic system failures might yet redirect capitalist circulations towards a politics of redistribution and non-accumulation, and an ethics of care
Ancient history · Capital (architecture · Capitalism · Colonialism · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Empire · Political science · Politics · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Water Governance and Infrastructure
Producing for the War
The Burden of Representation
The Right to Look
Telecommunications and the City
Vision, Race, and Modernity
Extraction and Labor in Equatorial Africa and Cameroon under Free French Rule
Visionary Infrastructure
Free French Africa in World War II
Africa and World War II
Decolonization and African Society
Listening to Images
Photography
The origin of German tragic drama
The Ethnography of Infrastructure
Reform and repression under the Free French
The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |