Copper Geographies by Ignacio Acosta, photographed from 2010 to 2015 across Chile, England, Wales, and France, follows copper through extraction, manufacture, trade, consumption, and recycling.
Developed through Acosta's practice-based doctorate at the University of Brighton and the AHRC-funded research project Traces of Nitrate, the work connects the Atacama Desert's mining ecologies with British industrial and financial networks. Copper's ordinary ubiquity provides its central paradox. The metal is concealed inside cables, buildings, currency, and electronics, while its production leaves extensive environmental and social traces. By following the commodity across space and time, Acosta examines uneven relations between extraction zones and centers of trade and consumption, as well as the colonial and capitalist histories embedded in landscapes.
The photographs range from desert expanses, slag heaps, worker housing, warehouses, and ports to London's financial district, museum specimens, electrical wiring, and computers awaiting shipment. Color and black-and-white photographs are presented within a broader research framework that, particularly in the project's exhibition and book forms, incorporates archival photographs, maps, satellite imagery, charts, technical diagrams, captions, and contextual texts. Carefully ordered compositions and frequently unpeopled sites create a restrained mood. Rather than directly depicting every aspect of mining's human and environmental consequences, Acosta uses the relationship between photographs and this contextual material to address labor, displacement, contamination, and community resistance that often remain outside the frame. Absence thus becomes part of the project's visual and interpretive structure rather than being resolved through the direct exposure associated with conventional photojournalism.
Acosta used analog large- and medium-format cameras mounted on a tripod, a method that slowed production and encouraged close attention to spatial relationships. Image-making followed archival and literary research, travel between dispersed locations, conversations with activists and historians, and walking-based investigation. These methods shaped the project as an interconnected body of artistic research in which photographs, writing, and cartography produce meaning together.
The project first appeared as a site-specific installation of 40 photographs, texts, and a map at the Biennial of the End of the World in Mar del Plata in 2014–15. A 21-work installation followed at Noorderlicht Photofestival's ARENA program in the Netherlands in 2016, and the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea presented a related exhibition in 2017. Editorial RM published the bilingual, 192-page book Copper Geographies in 2018, consolidating the photographs with historical, literary, and political contributions. Later presentations included Copper Geographies: Metallic Threads at the Martin Parr Foundation in 2022.
