Toxic Portraits: Resisting Multiple Invisibilities in the Environmental Justice Movement

Abstract

This essay conceptualizes "toxic portraits," close-up, in situ photographs of people in toxically assaulted places. Toxic portraits articulate the multiple invisibilities attending environmental injustice through a series of visible indexical signs. As a result, toxic portraits enable spectators to see the precariousness of life as dramatized in human relationships to the environments in which we live. Drawing on the "subjunctive voice of the visual" as a rhetorical heuristic, I conceptualize the productive space created by toxic portraits and ultimately argue that these images invite an ethically inflected response to the dangers of living in a polluted world.

Impurities: Thinking Ecologically WithSafe

“…Ecology includes, among other things, waste, detritus, death, decay, competition, and pollution—in short, what Evernden () called “wildness.” We may not like these things, but they nevertheless shape how we move through the world and so cannot simply be repudiated. Within the field of environmental communication, thinkers like Barnett (), Kelly (), Peeples (), and Pezzullo () are already engaging strange strangers in the form of toxic chemicals that permeate everyday life. By examining how toxins insinuate themselves into popular discourses, these scholars show us the ubiquity of chemicals, how naturalized their presence has become, and how varying rhetorical strategies expose them in different ways.…”

“…In this instance, common commodities—the stuff of morning rituals—come into view as potentially noxious chemical culprits. Making toxins visible, though fraught by challenges, is a common rhetorical tactic within environmental and environmental justice movements (e.g., Barnett, ; Kelly, ; Peeples, ; Pezzullo, ). In the slow movement from the bathroom, where audiences visually and aurally encounter the aerosols, to the bedroom, viewers watch as the chemicals travel with and on Greg's body to the bedside where he embraces Carol.…”

“…One way of approaching ecological art is through the concept of atmospheric rhetoric. Within the burgeoning scholarship on what might be called “toxic rhetorics” (Barnett, ; Kelly, ; Peeples, , ; Pezzullo, ; Spencer & Barnett, ), this concept sheds light on how media function not simply to convey meanings or to establish logical relationships, but also to cultivate modes of perception that exceed any particular sensory apparatus. For example, the “toxic screen” does more than build strong inferences to the insidiousness of toxins; it can also produce powerful modes of perception that enable audiences to discern connections between their bodies and the ecosystems within which they are enmeshed even in the absence of obvious or transparent indications.…”

“…From a rhetorical perspective, Safe is an example of what Kelly (, p. 3) recently called the “toxic screen,” or “the assimilation and representation of toxic imagery in narrative” television and cinema. Drawing upon and extending Peeples's (, ) notion of “toxic images” and Barnett's () theory of “toxic portraits,” Kelly suggested “that environmental communication scholars should also attend to the moving toxic image […] where toxic imagery is dramatized through popular television” and film (p. 5). This essay heeds Kelly's call by examining the formal and narrative qualities of Safe to understand better how this film generates modes of perception and thought appropriate to impure ecologies.…”

Witnessing e-waste through participatory photography in Ghana

“…Drawing on extended ethnographic research in Agbogbloshie, an urban scrapyard in Accra, Ghana that has become the subject of a contentious electronic waste (e-waste) narrative, this chapter explores the extent to which citizen 1 photography and similar participatory visual research efforts augment contemporary toxic studies in general and e-waste studies in particular. Attuned to the visual promises, politics, and possibilities of photography in toxic landscapes (Peeples 2011;Davies 2013;Barnett 2015;Rosenfeld et al 2018), the chapter contends that engaging with participatory visualization and documentation can provide vital contextualization for debates grappling with the toxic injustices and environmental politics of e-waste labor. I explore how and why visual techniques in participatory action research matter in global environmental justice studies in general and postcolonial e-waste studies in Ghana in particular.…”