On Prospecting

Abstract 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.