In each individual image, I first noticed the people in the image and then the background. The words came last. For the complete image, I simply scanned left to right.
My eye wanders in search of human bodies - I see initially the (environmental) impacts of humanity without the human subjects themselves. What happens to this area after it has been mined of its value in gold?
my eye moves from top to bottom, seemingly viewing the "stabilization of mercury" through the images
I cannot shake the thought that this might function as part of a larger collage. In looking, I am immediately drawn to the violence of the Marine chopping the wood which has morphed in situ to a village scape. Everything here is abrupt visually and from my POV begs for an opening up of narrative and context. That said, it does flow with the previous image's thematics, and again the text font choice, for me, alludes to an absurdity of horrrors manifest in the relationship between USAID and the island.
what's interesting to me about this image is not so much how my eye moved as how hard it had to work to read. which is apprrpriate to the distance in time in play here -- reading from the present to the mid-19th century. You have to resad it word by word, stopping and pondering and guessing and reading back and forward and revising your reading. We don't "see" print like this anymore and that makes it harder to read casually or transparently -- "naturally." Maybe it's an example of how to "toxify" text, or at least highlight its pharmakonic qualities of poison/gift, obscuring/showing: we're forced to confront the alien materiality of what usually passes as "information"
My eye first focuses on the “One in four” title. It moves down to the children walking across the screen and I perceive that one of them is red. At this point, I perceive the police force that I have noticed above the “One in 4” image as protective of the children. My eye moves up to focus in on the “protecting the children” image. My brain automatically assumes that these police officers are the protective force of the children below. However, I then perceive what the ‘one in four’ caption refers to. This is an incredible effective and disturbing juxtaposition because of the way I perceive hierarchy in images. With the fisheye perspective on the police force and the way they are positioned higher than the LAPD school children below them, I am apt to see the police force, again, as protective and (paternalistic) caregivers to the children below. However, the impact of the statistics (1 in 4 children arrested by LASPD are middle school aged youth) is incredibly disturbing. This is a powerful juxtaposition.
My eye is drawn to the debris and then through the space to walk through between two small embankments; then toward the horizon of scattered trees and the tilt of the landscape through the framing aslant. My eye ends on the muddy water pool to the right.
Eye goes from lower right (with the bottle) to the horizon, aka the muddy water. The critical essay pulls me back to the specifics of the bottle's illustration, in (deliberate?) parallel to the way the sequence of the first image--It's Elemental--to the second image--Matador--also moves focus from the global to the local field site.