Capturing Extraction: Geology, Photography, Industry and Institutional History in the Bingley Archive

Abstract

Godfrey Bingley was a British industrialist who took up geology, photography and travel in the 1880s. His photographs are housed at the University of Leeds, where he worked with its Chair of Geology. This article analyses the archive's projection of the imperial geological imaginary that emanated from Britain and extended to the Americas. It argues that these images mediate multitemporal scales, from the deep time of geology to the contractions of industrial development, enabled by the extractivist practices that photographic technology erased from history. It also demonstrates that practices of rephotographing Bingley's collection conjure these erasures as spectres of Empire.