What will remain of our devices in the strata of the far future? Stephen Cornford’s Petrified Media begins with a deliberate act of destruction: he melted a mobile phone in a geological furnace reaching temperatures of 1500ºC. The molten remnants were then processed, photographed, and analysed using the instruments and protocols of petrology. The resulting images, reproduced in this compact volume, are not documents of a phone but of a speculative technofossil—the mineral trace that consumer electronics might leave in the lithosphere. This is photography as laboratory practice, where the camera records what the furnace and microscope reveal.
The book pairs colourful microscope imagery with the Atlas of Media Metallurgy, a section that analyses the elemental composition of the fragments and provides background on the scarce metals essential to modern technological devices. Three essays—by media studies scholar Siobhan Angus, paleobiologist Jan Zalasiewicz, and Cornford himself—approach the subject from distinct theoretical positions, while Patrick Farmer’s text editing and Carel Fransen’s design give the project a coherent editorial shape. The exposed selfcover and four folded posters extend the book as a physical object, though its central argument is carried by the photographic plates and the analytical apparatus around them.
For collectors, Petrified Media matters less as a rarity than as a carefully considered example of research-driven photographic publishing. It sits at the intersection of contemporary art, media archaeology, and Anthropocene discourse, and its method—subjecting a commonplace object to extreme geological transformation—produces images that are at once abstract and evidentiary. The collaboration between an artist, a paleobiologist, and a media theorist ensures that the visual sequence is anchored in scientific and historical reflection. Published by The Eriskay Connection in 2023, the book is a concise, materially thoughtful addition to any collection concerned with photography’s role in imagining deep time and the afterlives of technology.
