Visual Culture.

This article reviews 2024 scholarship on the relationship between visual culture and extractive capitalism, focusing on how visual media are implicated in, contribute to, and might challenge global systems of resource extraction. It highlights key works that trace the material histories of visual media—such as film and photography—showing their dependence on mined materials and labor within capitalist political economies, including the environmental and social costs of extraction, especially of critical minerals like rare earth elements. The review also examines the dominant cultural style of immediacy in visual culture, linked to late capitalism's emphasis on circulation and presence, and explores how visual culture can resist or subvert extractive logics through archival research, ethical spectatorship, and alternative aesthetic practices. Overall, the article situates visual culture as both complicit in and potentially critical of extractivist capitalism, emphasizing the need for nuanced, historically grounded approaches that recognize diverse local contexts and envision more sustainable futures.