This is an existing art work and cultural commentary that the ethnographer has found and situated with a larger cultural context. It is an image referencing El Borracho but transforming the original drunken character into a grotesque image of three "dick-heads". The artist has simplified the visual elements however the stance and environment (seemingly against a wall outside a bar with a bottle of alcohol) remain consistent with the original image. As A. Mohammed notes, the changing clothing marks these images as suggesting that alcohol abuse is endemic across social class. Besides the logo tee in the last image, I can not discern the difference in dick-head's changing outfits. Noteably there is a progression of impotency across the image from left to right.
It is unclear whether the ethnographer took the photograph or found it. The notable factors are the specific times/days listed on the sign, the color of the sign (pink), the specific boundaries listed, the fact that the photo appears to have been taken at night. All of these factors convey an eerie feel to the photo, one that has the potential for propagating horrific violence against certain grousp of people based on race, class, sex, and gender. The policization of sex/gender in a very particular space convey a sense of suffocating regulation of sexuality that is indicative of the broader social perspectives of heteronormative values and belief systems surrounding the area.
This is an original photograph from a coastline in Panama where the author found extractive activities on the way to the mangrove forest. The darkness of the image contrasts with the background activities and gives a notion about the following context related to the toxicity present in this place.
Image #1 is a found image. It is centered and its perspective provides a sense of depth and excess, discipline and power. I think it is a terrific starting point to discussing absence.
Image #2: Is a created image, a composite and editing of two photos into one. I am uncertain if it successfully conveys what the author is intending. When I look at this image I question the scale and placement of Biddy Mason's portrait within the frame. Not that Biddy Mason should not be front and center, but I do not know how presence impacts my reading of the other photo. There is a foreground/background play at work that I struggle to process. The photo of the white pioneers is presented as a typical archived photograph. Biddy Mason's portrait is the spectral visualization that haunts the archive collection. The family may be represented archive, but their names, hopes, lives, impact on Los Angeles, are also seemingly absent from the archive. These are my questions provoked by my reading of this image.
The image is a collected one (advertisement) of a city combined a graph prepared to illustrate the racial demographics of a city. The scale of attention is broad, but I cannot help feeling that it is so broad the ties to toxicity become vague. Nonetheless, the composition does provide an opportunity to think about how race, urban placemaking, and a liveability discourse are constructed. So, the comparative nature of the image is generative, so the composition works. Unfortunately, I had trouble finding any representational, compositional, aesthetic impetus that would produce reflection about toxicity and pollution.
This is a photograph that was taken by the ethnographer. The colour in the photograph is where the dramatic interplay of plastic and forest stands out and is most notable.
This found image from Laura Pulido (2000) is a GIS produced map which combines TRI data with census data to illustrate the scale of correlation between places of toxic release and racialized communities in Los Angeles. Its scale of attention is notable, as it shows not only the city limits of Los Angeles, but also the industrial infrastructure of the surrounding area, and how closely it corresponds to the location of non-white communities. This scale is part of the creative translation of data by environmental activists. The map’s aesthetic reveals multiple clusters of TRI sites, and how they are situated in residential areas at the county level.
This is a found image of an installation at the Ganga Ram hospital in Delhi, created by Lung Care Foundation. Its composition is notable for showing the installation before and after Diwali fireworks, and for placing the images on a background which shows the haze of the local atmosphere during this time.
This created image has a powerful composition, where the blurred lines of a fence frame an image of a snowy field, with a water tower in the distance. The snow is provokative, as it hides the ground underneath, and belies the degree of contamination of the site. At the same time, the forest in the distance seems to abruptly stop, which gives the viewer a clue that something is impacting the land in the foreground.
This combination of two found images is notable in how it creates a stark contrast between the deliberate targeting of SROs and a romanticized form of historical revisionism promoted by Columbia University on their website. Its double exposure aesthetic is slightly disorienting, which can be productive in how it makes the viewer reflect on how the ongoing toxicity of forced removal via notions of blight is or isn’t visible.