“Mining Photography: The Ecological Footprint of Image Production” is a group exhibition that explores photography’s ambivalent relationship to the Anthropocene and how the medium impacts nature, today. Focusing on the ways in which photography is complicit in the extraction and exploitation of natural resources, the exhibition seeks to explore what can be learned about climate change from the history of photography and the system that produced it, and what photography may tell us about a future beyond climate change. 

The exhibition features a new work by artist Noa Yafe, commissioned by Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. In this project, Yafe responds to the work of Charles Negré and Louis Vignes, two groundbreaking French photographers who visited Palestine in the nineteenth century. In the work, Yafe reveals the hidden materiality of early photographic production and its relation to colonial exploration in the nineteenth century.