hepler Annotations

In response to:

Why do you think this particular image was selected or fashioned in the way presented?

Wednesday, December 5, 2018 - 4:42pm

This image presents an argument for understanding Watts as a process, not an event, unfolding over an extended period of time (how far could we meaningfully stretch it and weave it). Nor is this history invisible -- powerful images that tell it are there to be found, if you just get outside the assumptions of event-based historiography. Some pretty important arguments about environmental toxicity run in a similar direction, e.g. Nixon, Slow Violence and some of Scott Knowles' arguments. In fact, I see this image as very much in the spirit of the kinds of experimentation with visual genres that Nixon calls for, though it addresses a toxic environment of a different sort (or is it?).

I found it a bit more difficult to arrive at a sense of the specific toxic subject of the second and third images. Perhaps that's the point -- toxic places and toxic boosters run through the history of Los Angeles since the 19th century. Still, I feel like I should be coming away from these images, as I do from the first one, with my conception of history productively unsettled in some way that I can put my finger on. I'm not quite there yet on those two (although the bayonet into Japan is plenty unsettling!).

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