Infrastructures of Light: Tropicapitalism and Germaine Krull’s Camera

Abstract

To understand the relationship between the camera and colonial capitalism, we must consider photography not just as a tool but as an infrastructural system, the very grounds upon which movements of goods, capital and ideas can be sustained, regulated, and interrupted. Focusing on French-Dutch-German photographer Germaine Krull, this article examines how the development of photographic infrastructures in mid-twentieth century Paris and Equatorial Africa both created and foiled networks for distributing fantasies of colonial development. Photographic infrastructures enabled the whiting out of racialized labor, the recasting of rubber, coffee and gold as the currency of freedom during WWII, and the refining of seemingly limitless resources of African light into image-objects. In the service of colonial fantasy, however, Krull’s photography was an unwittingly “dodgy” infrastructure, bringing to light a series of interruptions, decelerations and breakdowns in the resource networks purporting to insulate the French empire from the dangers of world war and propel imperial subjects and citizens into a future of colonial progress. The history of Krull’s “dodgy” photographic infrastructure therefore reveals pathways to undoing colonial capitalism from within, showing how deliberate photographic system failures might yet redirect capitalist circulations towards a politics of redistribution and non-accumulation, and an ethics of care.