This image combines a variety of material artifacts geared towards women to show us the ways in which women are exposed to toxicity. In doing so, it also uncovers the hegemonic discourses that hide toxicity in the products women use on a daily basis.
The image is ethnographic in that it is representative of a compounding of components at a single field site. To the design statement I would add a statement regarding the photographer's choice to foreground the bottle of mercury (with the mine in the background). What does this spatial representation do for the reading of the image?
This image, and the others you have put together in this collapse-of-time model, bring me back to Foucault's dislike of the term "history". These images, by revealing what has been obfuscated by rigged narratives, and racist power pulpits, instead ethnographically point to the genealogical work of disarticulating particular archives, with their particular epistemological pedigrees. This image in particular requires that we de-familiarize ourselves with the "history" often celebrated in official city narratives, and instead remember the space as it was when it told life from another circuit of experience. Doing so furthers the de-colonial impulse to re-assemble and re-articulate the present through the archives uncollected or scattered.
I like your choice of the infographic as quintessential to experiences of lead exposure. I am interested in what is left unsaid by the infographics which start from the vantage point of wanting to distill complexities into useable vernaculars. For instance, to push against the worn-out saying, "knowledge is power", in the case of a poor family finding out that their home is draped in lead paint, "knowledge is disempowering". Further, when left without recourse after the identification of a lead risk/exposure, parents in particular fall under unique forms of surveillance, which if made public, could lead to judgment and isolation. My point being, I think the infographic is a powerful ethnographic artifact for what it hides as musch as it conveys.
I'm interested in learning more about the author/artist/ethnographer's methods as a filmaker. How does one approach toxic capture through film? How do the subtitles work to both translate and interpret toxicity?
I'm interested in learning more about the author/artist/ethnographer's methods as a filmaker. How does one approach toxic capture through film? How do the subtitles work to both translate and interpret toxicity?
Again, I would add more image description for the sake of accessibility and thick description.
This image is ethnographic in the sense that it is grounded in a community. I would add more image description to the design statement for the sake of ‘thick description.’ This would also make the image more accessible to those who cannot see the details well enough to grasp the overall picture.
There was no design statement that I could view, but I would guess that the image is ethnographic in "studying up" re corporate discourses of disaster/toxicant remediation. The assumption is that only liquid mercury is hazardous and that changing the form will remediate/buffer the toxicity; but the remediation is mostly discursive (i.e., b/c there's less awareness of cinnabar's toxicity in the present moment).
I want to know who is the chromatographer? How did she learn how to make these images through this process, and why? Does she teach people in turn? Who are these images intended to be seen and read by?