Nitrate ruins: the photography of mining in the Atacama Desert, Chile

Abstract

A photographic album entitled Oficina Alianza and Port of Iquique 1899 illustrates the industrial development of nitrate mining in Chile. From the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth, British capitalists dominated the extraction of Chilean nitrate and its export as a fertilizer and an explosive. The Oficina Alianza, a nitrate works at the centre of British monopoly of the trade, is, as other oficinas across the Antofagasta and Tarapacá regions of the Atacama Desert, a ruin. This article considers the correspondences between Alianza’s photographic album, a record of a working nitrate oficina, and its abandoned industrial structures. It examines the ruin and the photograph as Benjaminian allegories.