"Toxic People," "Toxic Places," and "Toxic Periods" are collages I assembled mostly from L.A. Public Library's online photography collections. This digital database is fully public, searchable, and compiles several image sets: Shades of L.A., the Herald Examiner (a defunct Hearst paper, yes that Hearst), the Valley Times, etc. My inspiration for doing this research began with an everyday practice I initiated as a resolution for the New Year, 1 January 2018. My dissertation project engages with methodologies from the New Sensory History. Chapter 1 is called "White Sight" and presents an account of visualities in L.A.'s car culture as related to postwar urban/suburban white identity formation.
Instagram is a social media platform oriented toward visuality, so I decided to use it as a showcase, plus an informal personal archive, for interesting images I found via L.A.P.L. As an exercise for getting through these collections (in exactly one year), I opted to post at least one image commemorating that day in L.A. history and to pair it a short essay. The result, #LAunforgotten, has developed into a year in L.A. history, with posts going as far back as the Spanish pueblo's founding and as far forward as the next solar eclipse to pass over the region (2800s).
In honor of Visualizing Toxic Substances (VTS), I reimagined my #LAunforgotten as a playful revolt against the one-dimensional thinking Instagram promotes. Toxigram is a term I use to reference my relentlessly critical, at times cynical, contributions to what otherwise looks like a rather superficial medium for conveying "positive thinking." Each of the three collages, "Toxic People," "Toxic Places," and "Toxic Periods," seeks to jolt viewers into an awareness of new connections among several themes the historiography typically cannot link together. My titles and the three accompanying essays point out a few links I see and stress, but please treat the collages as prompts facilitating your finding and making original connections.
If you would like to see more of my work online, please go to @historycritic on Instagram.