Toxic Exposures: Pollution, Vulnerability, Visbility
What does it mean to be exposed?
In photography, exposure denotes the amount of light which reaches the camera sensor or film. An image is underexposed when the sensor or film does not receive enough light, and overexposed when it receives too much light. To expose also means to uncover, open up, make visible. But exposure produces vulnerability--to be exposed means to be vulnerable to environments and infrastructures. I'm interested in the different meanings of "exposure," and how they might be connected. Why might it be important to explore photographic exposure, or exposure as a process of making visible, alongside exposure to pollution and toxicity?Photography as a medium emerged out of the Industrial Revolution, the proposed beginning of the Anthropocene, or the "age of humans." The Anthropocene marks the point at which the universal anthropos becomes inextricable from the geologic record through processes such as resource extraction, pollution, and waste accumulation.
Despite this image being first photograph of a human being, by Louis Daguerre, the scale of the building dominates the frame, almost drowning out the presence of the people in the bottom left of the frame. Thom Davies draws attention to the chimneys, suggesting that "it’s not hard to imagine these stacks billowing coal smoke into the surrounding streets, along with the dawning of the Industrial Revolution" (2). The history of photography and the history of pollution are intimately intertwined. In On Photography, Susan Sontag articulates how "Cameras began duplicating the world at the moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing" (11). Photography is, in other words, an Anthropocene medium.
Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others explores the implications of visual representations war and violence as "spectacle" but how might the questions Sontag raises apply to less visible, forms of violence? Rob Nixon defines slow violence as a "violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all" (2). Slow violence is, in part, the violence of toxic exposure. For Nixon, a "major challenge" of slow violence lies in how to represent a process which evades attempts at representation, "how to devise arresting stories images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects" (3). What role does photography play in representing the attritional, delayed effects of slow violence? If, as Thom Davies posits, "there is an inherent tension between the quick temporality of photography and the slowly unfolding ‘moment’ of pollution" (1), in what ways can photography make pollution visible?
In "Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance," Judith Butler theorizes "the human body as a certain kind of dependency on infrastructure, understood complexly as environment, social relations, and networks of support and sustenance by which the human itself proves not to be divided from the animal or from the technical world, foregrounding "the ways in which we are vulnerable to decimated or disappearing infrastructures, economic supports, and predictable and well-compensated labor (21). Such vulnerability does not undermine agency, but rather, acts as a "collective form of resistance" which is "structured very differently than the idea of a political subject that establishes its agency by vanquishing its vulnerability--this is the masculinist ideal we surely ought to continue to oppose" (24). I am interested in exploring how photography can be used to represent vulnerability as exposure to toxicity as well as a form of collective resistance for environmental justice.
Latoya Ruby Frazier and Edward Burtynsky
Frazier and Burtynsky have two very different approaches to photographing pollution and toxicity.
Born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, Latoya Ruby Frazier collaborated with her mother and grandmother in The Notion of Family to document the impacts of pollution from the Edgar Thomson Steel mill at the center of the town. Through the histories of redlining and white flight, black families in Braddock are disproportionately exposed to and impacted by the pollution from the mill. Frazier grew up in the area closest to the mill–called “the Bottom.” The Notion of Family is a collection of photographs which Frazier and family made over the course of four years, from 2010-2014. It includes images of the decaying landscape and intimate portraits of Frazier’s family. The Notion of Family encapsulates vulnerability through collaboration as well as through its representation of the enmeshment of landscape history, bodies, and familial history.
 by Latoya Ruby Frazier.jpeg){kind=link}
Edward Burtynsky is a Canadian photographer known for his large-scale landscape photography. When I first saw Burtynsky’s photography I was struck by the scale, the lack of people, and also the aestheticization of polluted and extracted landscapes. Much of Burtynksy’s photography attempts to represent the “Anthropocene” through absence–absence of life and extracted landscapes. Burtynsky illustrates the connection between bodies and landscapes through the absence of people. I am having a much more difficult time reockoning with Burtynsky’s representation of pollution, but I’m interested in the question of whether the vast scale of Burtynsky’s photography recognizes the inability, or the inadequacy of photography to fully represent the scale of pollution and slow violence.
Further questions to explore:
“To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability” (11).
- Latoya Ruby Frazier photographs in film. I would be interested to further explore her photography within the context of "liquid time."
- In Exposed, Stacy Alaimo suggests that "nature, for the most part, does not watch itself being looked at. Nor does it perform parodies of its own representation. Thus perhaps it is only through a kind of negativity that its representation can be challenged" (76). And that "On the edge of visibility, on the verge of disappearance, there are possibilities for recognition" (77). What would the "look" of nature look like?