How do we know e-waste? Electronic discards and the double social life of photography and video methods
A key genre of methods that the report relies on is documentary photography (samples of which are available here) and, in the video version of the report, documentary film. As Rose (2001: 20) writes,
Documentary photography originally tended to picture poor, oppressed or marginalized individuals, often as part of reformist projects to show the horror of their lives and thus inspire change. The aim was to be as objective and accurate as possible in these depictions.
Reports on e-waste from other influential ENGO's such as Greenpeace also rely on the same sorts of method assemblages as the BAN report and video do. Arguably it is the original intentions of the documentary genres in both photography and film that form some of the key methodological hinterlands that these reports rely on for their claims to being sources of trustworthy knowledge. As a genre, documentary draws on the hinterland of witnessing, especially first-person or eye witnessing for its authority to claim trustworthiness about that which it is claiming to have knowledge. There is, of course, a long tradition of critical analysis that questions such underlying assumptions - and similar claims about framing, picturing, representation, and the like could be raised about the images made and mobilized by BAN and other ENGOs. To join that kind of critical conversation we might want to note how, in the written report, images and texts work together in a rhetorical strategy designed to invoke a particular kind of witnessing - the modest witness - an issue I've written about here.
I think one of the reasons documentary methods like these are so
powerful - that is, that they come to circulate, inform, and have active
force - is precisely because they are able to draw on the hinterland,
the method assemblages, that Rose describes above. Perhaps this is
obvious. On the other hand, the extent to which Exporting Harm
and documents of the same genre inform the e-waste archive suggests that
this obviousness is something that is also taken for granted as
unproblematic. Documentary photography and video used in ENGO reports on e-waste partly generate the phenomenon being documented, its sites, and various connections between those sites and the witnessing subject, including moral and emotional connections. They generate a world. What do I mean? Exporting Harm relies on modest witnessing so as to bolster is claims about several findings. The first finding listed in the report's summary is that "[m]illions of pounds of electronic waste (e-waste) from obsolete computers and and TVs are being generated in the U.S. each year and huge amounts - an estimated 50%-80% - are being exported" (BAN 2002: 4).
