On Prospecting: Visual Culture between Extraction and Speculation

In its narrow sense, prospecting is defined as the search for mineral deposits with
a view to exploit them for financial gain. In the last few decades, this definition has been expanded
to include bioprospecting, in which genetic resources are transformed into proprietary
knowledge, frequently at the expense of communities who have cultivated this knowledge
over generations. Prospecting is therefore inescapably extractive, but insofar as it involves a
gamble on the profitability of a resource in the future, it is also inherently speculative. Taking
recent discussions of the “extractive view” as its starting point, this article focuses on the role
of visual culture in prospecting. It investigates how the search for resources generates a visual
culture of prospecting and a visual culture about prospecting, whether through aerial
views of resource frontiers, spectacular images that attract venture capital, or “specimen
views” that isolate objects of economic interest. Tracing a path from the nineteenth-century
survey photographs of Timothy O’Sullivan to contemporary work by the likes of Edith Morales
and the group On-Trade-Off, it demonstrates how artists repurpose and diversify the
visual culture of prospecting, documenting the forces at play in the struggle over lithium
extraction or investigating the methods by which genetic raw materials are turned into patentable
commodities.