Photography was invented between the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s Communist Manifesto. Taking the intertwined development of capitalism and the camera as a starting point, this talk by Kevin Coleman asks — how might we use archives of capital to render visible corporate techniques of erasure while also commemorating lives violently taken? Coleman offers provisional answers to this question by drawing on ideas developed in Capitalism and the Camera (Verso 2021), which he co-edited with Daniel James, and placing them in conversation with his film-in-progress, The Photos We Don’t Get to See, about the 1928 massacre of striking workers at United Fruit Company’s banana plantation in Cienaga, Colombia. Coleman reflects on his work with archives in different public facing registers to argue for harnessing company archives to make visible the techniques of a corporation; to commemorate lives and futures cut short; and to use capitalism’s own images as resources for expanding human freedom and rebuilding the commons.

Kevin Coleman is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto. He is the author of A Camera in the Garden of Eden, a study of the spectacle and practice of citizenship in the banana plantations of Honduras, and co-editor of Capitalism and the Camera, a collection that draws leading theorists of photography together in disagreement over the status of the photograph in our era.

Lorena Mostajo Lorena Mostajo is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. She is an artist whose photographic practice spans Mexico, the United States, and Bolivia. Her current projects are centered on the ways in which vernacular and historical photographs, national imaginaries, global and local economies, and tourism intersect. She is the founder of Taller California, a small artist press for the communities of the Tijuana-San Diego region. In Mexico, she co-edited with Mara Fortes Chris Marker Inmemoria and the first Spanish translation of Amos Vogel’s Film As Subversive Art. 

Please note that this is an in-person event. It will be followed by a reception with light refreshments.

Register for the event here.