Jacob Badcock

Jacob Badcock is an art historian specialising in ecocritical approaches to modern and contemporary art and visual culture.

His PhD research, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, explored how documentary photography shapes representations of environmental “crisis” zones in the Global South. Working at the intersection of art history, anthropology, and discard studies, he examined how photographic portrayals of Agbogbloshie—an e-waste processing site in Accra, Ghana—have informed “green” interventions by international NGOs seeking to reduce e-waste pollution. Drawing on a wide range of visual sources, including colonial photographic archives, medical photography, “operational” imagery, amateur photography, art photography, and photojournalism, he identified the constitutive role of the camera in the police- and military-backed demolition of Agbogbloshie in July 2021. This event, he argued, echoed the use of photography to legitimise colonial-era “slum” clearances in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In doing so, his research highlights the enduring relationship between visual representation, environmental governance, and colonial geography that continues to shape urban space in African cities.

Jacob is currently developing two future research projects: First, a close examination of representations of mining and sanitation in the British colonial photographic archive, exploring how colonial desire for wealth extraction was bound up with anxieties about ‘native’ disease and the use of the camera to identify, externalise, and exert control over the African natural environment. Second, an art-historical study of the use of wearable cameras in medical photography and occupational epidemiology, with particular attention to how these technologies measure the body, reinforce workplace surveillance, and visualise workers’ exposures to environmental pollutants.

Before joining the Courtauld, Jacob taught at the Slade School of Fine Art and University College London. His research has been widely published, with work appearing in Burlington Contemporary Journal, Journal of Visual Culture, and the edited volume Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care (Routledge, 2023). He currently co-chairs the NatureCulture Lab reading group, an interdisciplinary research collective run in partnership with the Hochschule der Künste Bern (HKB).

Jacob is a Teaching Fellow and course leader for the MA Special Option Global Conceptualism: The Last Avant-Garde or a New Beginning? and the BA3 course Modern, Postmodern, and Digital Photography. He welcomes undergraduate dissertation projects on any aspect of modern and contemporary art history, with particular interest in Marxist and ecocritical approaches.