This essay traces the sources of sodium nitrate and sulfuric acid, compounds essential to the photography industry, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on a series of essays from 1887 entitled “The Origin and Technology of Photographic Chemicals” by manufacturing chemist Frank H. Rosengarten, I follow these compounds from their extraction points in Chile and Sicily, respectively, to the factories of chemical companies and onto the studios of photographers. As will be shown through an analysis of period photographs and texts, the appropriation of these materials had devastating effects on local populations and environments. By delineating the trajectories of these chemicals, this essay not only seeks to expand current knowledge of photographic materials and labour but to situate early photography within the practices of extractive capitalism, or extractivisms, to use Eduardo Gudyna’s phrasing.