This group of commentary essays explores the pervasive profit-seeking extraction of the planet’s organic and inorganic materials during the nineteenth century, a mindset that scholars in environmental humanities identify as extractivism. The authors attend to art and visual culture in which extractive activities, processes, and attitudes reflected the century’s intensifying demand for resources that fueled the forces of colonization and dispossession. With ecocritical and new materialist approaches in mind, these scholars address how image-makers registered increasing violence against places, people, animals, plants, and abiotic entities. But they also encourage reading images and objects against the grain of their ostensible messages to discover modes of resistance to extractive rapacity and stories that anticipate the present awareness of planetary limits.

What bodies of knowledge are intentionally and unintentionally revealed when an artist attempts to visualize a place of extraction? This essay considers this question through George Paulding Farnham’s Ptarmigan Vase. In 1901, Tiffany & Company’s lead designer became the primary owner of the Ptarmigan Mine, located in the Purcell Mountains of southeastern British Columbia. To promote his investment, Farnham fabricated a presentation vase out of the mine’s metals and included on its surface a conglomeration of symbols suggesting the metals’ origins. The elements of the vase’s construction, from the metallic lamination process of mokumé-gane to engraved symbols of fauna, reveal the mountain’s dynamic ecologies, devalued by extractive industry. By analyzing the design program, I argue that the vase visualizes paradoxical relationships to land that suggest paradigms beyond extraction, including Ktuanxa worldviews that are central to the First Nation’s fight to prevent further extraction in the region today.

Mercury was necessary to early photography, from developing the daguerreotype plate with its fumes to the extraction of silver through a process of amalgamation. But these minerals were acquired at great cost to both land and laborers. This essay traces the transatlantic trade in mercury and silver through its replacement by nineteenth-century transpacific and intra-American networks, underscoring the imperial relationships and labor histories that underlie photography’s mineral dependencies. Specifically, it focuses on visual expresses of mining labor, including mistreatment and resistance at three sites: Almadén, Spain; Pachuca in New Spain, the area now known as Mexico; and Almaden, California. The result is a more global and deep-rooted conception of “American” photography.

In the mid-nineteenth century, few substances were as important to the global agricultural marketplace as guano, or bird dung, a powerful fertilizer that rejuvenated exhausted soils in the United States and Europe. Yet, due to its base nature, this reviled and valuable substance challenged the limits of representability in visual culture. This essay examines photographs of guano excavation on Peru’s Chincha islands, published in Alexander Gardner’s 1865 album ‘Rays of Sunshine from South America,’ an anonymous painting of Navassa Island in the Caribbean, created around 1865, and a poster advertising BD Sea Fowl Guano, produced for the Bradley Fertilizer Company between 1861 and 1872. I argue that artists pictured guano in ways that evaded both its biotic origins and the cruel conditions in which it was extracted.

In 1900, at the Colonial Diorama Pavilion at the Universal Exposition in Paris, Gaston Roullet exhibited a state-sponsored panorama of drying codfish, set on a small island off the southeastern shore of Newfoundland. As this essay explores, the painting promoted France’s colonial claim to this valuable land that was a critical base for the fishing and exportation of North Atlantic codfish. The seemingly limitless abundance of codfish in North Atlantic waters was a food commons decimated over the course of the modern era. Visual representations of the exploitation of fish stocks and the sale of fish participated in the extractive logic of a relentless global effort to empty the oceans.

In an explanatory program for his 1899 painting Custer’s Last Stand, Edgar Paxson claimed that he had “gathered data” of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which he “sifted and resifted” for two full decades. With this work, Paxson joined a wide host of other settler artists who interrogated Native eyewitnesses to glean information of the conflict for their compositions. Tellingly, his description elided evidentiary or “data” extraction with resource prospecting, linking artistic refinement processes with those of copper mines that surrounded his studio in Butte, Montana. This essay explores the ways in which extractive impulses are layered in Paxson’s picture across registers of culture, knowledge, and environment. Ultimately, I argue that Paxson’s hyperfocus on historical accuracy, fact, and detail—especially in light of the Little Bighorn’s testimonial incongruity—served as a means of securing witness status, and hence dominance, for the settler view.

This essay returns the paintings of Nell Blaine to the scene that produced them. Once a celebrated abstract painter, Blaine began making modest portraits, still lifes, and landscapes around 1950. Blaine made this move when involved with a group of artists that included the New York School Poets, such as John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. These poets, known for their interest in occasional poetry and quotidian detail, are often celebrated for articulating and cultivating queer modes of sociality in mid-century Manhattan. This essay situates Blaine’s figurative paintings in this shared cultural context, not simply to recall the social milieu in which they were made, but to show how they were similarly invested in cultivating a queer sociality. In reframing Blaine as a queer modernist, the essay expands current histories of American modernism, which fail to register not just the diverse practices of artists in the 1950s, but also their diverse aims.

Focusing on a single New Deal initiative, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Section of Fine Arts (1934–43), this essay considers controversies and negotiations over racial content in public murals, with particular attention to post office decor for Salina, Kansas, and St. Joseph, Missouri. Section artists had to attend to waves of input from administrators, juries, civic leaders, postmasters, journalists, politicians, and the general public. Among their criticisms, both Black and White complainants explicitly identified and decried racial slurs in Section productions, whether persistent anti-Black stereotypes or calumnies about White locals’ eugenic inferiority. When local citizens protested, the Treasury heeded Black audiences far less often than their White counterparts. Even more, White elites participated much more frequently as selection jurors, had greater opportunities to interact with and counsel artists, and found their politicians far more willing to advocate on their behalf.

In the post–Civil War United States, spirit pictures were made by mediums who claimed not to know how their results were obtained, for clients whose religious belief blinded them to duplicity. Not all spirit photographs were made this way, however, or were commissioned with this motivation. In addition to Spiritualism, there are two photographic contexts—memorial portraiture and psychical experimentation—where spirit photographs served vastly different yet sometimes intersecting goals. In this essay I align these non-Spiritualist goals with two spirit portrait formats: photographs of a mourner-with-portrait and photographs of a spirit-with-portrait. The former, I argue, evolved in parallel to mourning portraiture in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, as photography was adapted to the rituals surrounding death. The latter, I show, are evidence of telepathic communication. They demonstrate a mediumistic practice, whether or not they were also made to console the client.