Toxic Portraits: Resisting Multiple Invisibilities in the Environmental Justice Movement

Abstract

This essay conceptualizes “toxic portraits,” close-up, in situ photographs of people in toxically assaulted places. Toxic portraits articulate the multiple invisibilities attending environmental injustice through a series of visible indexical signs. As a result, toxic portraits enable spectators to see the precariousness of life as dramatized in human relationships to the environments in which we live. Drawing on the “subjunctive voice of the visual” as a rhetorical heuristic, I conceptualize the productive space created by toxic portraits and ultimately argue that these images invite an ethically inflected response to the dangers of living in a polluted world.

Keywords:

• Pollution
• Portraits
• Visual Rhetoric
• Environmental Justice
• Subjunctive

Notes

[1] See Sheila Kaplan, “EPA Develops Neurotoxicants List, New Testing,” Investigative Reporting Workshop (December 22, 2010), accessed May 31, 2014, http://investigativereportingworkshop.org/investigations/toxic-influence/story/epa-develops-neurotoxicants-list/.

[2] Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 58–9.

[3] Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism, 29.

[4] Henry M. Vyner, Invisible Trauma: The Psychosocial Effects of Invisible Environmental Contaminants (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1988), 13–8.

[5] Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4.

[6] See Robert D. Bullard, Paul Mohai, Robin Saha, and Beverly Wright, Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty: 1987–2007 (Cleveland, OH: United Church of Christ, 2007), accessed May 8, 2013, www.sph.umich.edu/symposium/2010/pdf/bullard1.pdf; Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000).

[7] Robert D. Bullard, Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1993): 12.

[8] Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism, 5.

[9] See Kevin Michael DeLuca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999); Jennifer Peeples, “Toxic Sublime: Imaging Contaminated Landscapes,” Environmental Communication 5, no. 4 (2011): 373–92.

[10] See, e.g., Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 122.

[11] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London, UK: Verso, 2004).

[12] Barbie Zelizer, “The Voice of the Visual in Memory,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2004).

[13] Jennifer Peeples and Kevin Michael DeLuca, “The Truth of the Matter: Motherhood, Community and Environmental Justice,” Women's Studies in Communication 29, no. 1 (2006): 60.

[14] For a discussion of this problem, see Steve Gold, “Causation in Toxic Torts: Burdens of Proof, Standards of Persuasion, and Statistical Evidence,” The Yale Law Journal 96, no. 2 (1986): 376–402.

[15] Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism, 3.

[16] A simple Google query reveals the extent to which toxic tours have become popular rhetorical tactics among environmental justice and anti-toxics organizations.

[17] Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism, 162.

[18] Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism, 164.

[19] Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism, 166.

[20] Tom Bowers, “Mountaintop Removal as a Case Study: The Possibilities for Public Advocacy Through Visual Toxic Tours,” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 7, no. 3 (2013): 373.

[21] Butler, Frames of War, 14.

[22] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).

[23] Barthes, Camera Lucida, 76 (emphasis in original).

[24] Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1977): 5.

[25] Barthes, Camera Lucida, 77.

[26] Jennifer Peeples, “Toxic Sublime: Imaging Contaminated Landscapes,” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 5, no. 4 (2011): 375.

[27] Jennifer Peeples, “Imaging Toxins,” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 7, no. 2 (2013): 193, emphasis in original.

[28] Jonathan Curvin, “Realism in Early American Art and Theatre,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 30, no. 4 (1944): 451.

[29] Cara Finnegan, “Recognizing Lincoln: Image Vernaculars in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8, no. 1 (2005): 42; Rachel Hall, Wanted: The Outlaw in American Visual Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 53.

[30] Janet Walker, “Rights and Return: Perils and Fantasies of Situated Testimony after Katrina,” in Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering, eds. Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker (New York: Routledge, 2010), 85.

[31] Danielle Endres and Samantha Senda-Cook, “Location Matters: The Rhetoric of Place in Social Protect,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 3 (2011): 258.

[32] Endres and Senda-Cook, “Location Matters,” 276.

[33] Peeples, “Imaging Toxins,” 194.

[34] Steve Lerner, “Corpus Christi: Hillcrest Residents Exposed to Benzene in Neighborhood Next Door to Refinery Row,” Collaborative on Health and the Environment (July 24, 2007), accessed October 31, 2013, http://www.healthandenvironment.org/articles/homepage/1886/

[35] Scarry, The Body in Pain, 15.

[36] See, for examples, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic Photography: The Image of Accidental Napalm,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20, no. 1 (2003): 35–66; Christine Harold and Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Behold the Corpse: Violent Images and the Case of Emmett Till,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8, no. 2 (2005): 267; Davi Johnson, “Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 Birmingham Campaign as Image Event,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10, no. 1 (2007): 2; W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 401; Peeples, “Imaging Toxins,” 193–94.

[37] Simply visualizing pain or suffering, or the possibility for pain or suffering to emerge in particular bodies, does not mean that spectators will be moved to respond. Susan Sontag addresses this point most explicitly in Regarding the Pain of Others. Sontag unrelentingly criticizes photographs for their inability to somehow make the spectator feel as the subject of the portrait feels. I am with Susie Linfield when I say that this seems an impossible standard by which to judge photographs, or any other medium for that matter. That a photograph cannot fully convey a set of sensory feelings, however true it may be in principle, does not mean that we ought to abandon photographs more generally. Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others.

[38] Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008).

[39] Azoulay, Civil Contract of Photography, 16.

[40] Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2nd edition) (London, UK: Routledge, 2006), 118.

[41] “Manchester: An Environmental Battleground,” Earth First! Newsline (December 31, 2012), accessed January 30, 2013, http://earthfirstnews.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/manchesterdemand/.

[42] Zelizer, “Voice of the Visual,” 163.

[43] Barbie Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

[44] Zelizer, “Voice of the Visual,” 163.

[45] Zelizer, About to Die, 6.

[46] Zelizer, “Voice of the Visual,” 165.

[47] Zelizer, About to Die, 76.

[48] Zelizer, About to Die, 123.

[49] See, for instance, Michelle Murray Yang, “Still Burning: Self-Immolation as Photographic Protest,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 1 (2011): 1–25.

[50] Steve Lerner, Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 99.

[51] Ari Phillips, “Walking the Fence Line,” Texas Observer (March 2, 2011), accessed October 31, 2012, http://www.texasobserver.org/walking-the-fence-line/.

[52] Lerner, “Corpus Christi.”

[53] Lerner, “Corpus Christi.”

[54] Lerner, “Corpus Christi.”

[55] For an insightful discussion of “slow death” see Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 95–120.

[56] Zelizer, “Voice of the Visual,” 163.

[57] Zelizer, About to Die, 123.

[58] See “Benzene,” Environmental Protection Agency (October 18, 2013), accessed May 31, 2014, http://www.epa.gov/ttn/atw/hlthef/benzene.html/; “Hexane,” Environmental Protection Agency (October 18, 2013), accessed May 31, 2014, http://www.epa.gov/ttn/atw/hlthef/hexane.html/.

[59] Lerner, “Corpus Christi.”

[60] Lerner, Sacrifice Zones, 106.

[61] Lerner, “Corpus Christi.”

[62] Lerner, “Corpus Christi.”

[63] Lerner, “Corpus Christi.”

[64] Zelizer, About to Die, 149.

[65] Zelizer, About to Die, 151.

[66] Zelizer, About to Die, 149.

[67] See Yang, “Still Burning,” for more on this idea.

[68] Butler, Frames of War, 14.