Quarterly Journal of Speech
ISSN: 0033-5630 (Print) 1479-5779 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rqjs20
Toxic Portraits: Resisting Multiple Invisibilities in
the Environmental Justice Movement
Joshua Trey Barnett
To cite this article: Joshua Trey Barnett (2015) Toxic Portraits: Resisting Multiple Invisibilities
in the Environmental Justice Movement, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 101:2, 405-425, DOI:
10.1080/00335630.2015.1005121
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2015.1005121
Published online: 02 Apr 2015.
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Date: 11 February 2016, At: 16:43
Quarterly Journal of Speech
Vol. 101, No. 2, May 2015, pp. 405–425
Toxic Portraits: Resisting Multiple
Invisibilities in the Environmental Justice
Movement
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Joshua Trey Barnett
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
Although some of the most common toxins—such as asbestos, lead, and mercury—
are household names, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that,
unbeknownst to most of us, thousands of other toxins circulate widely.1 Once these
toxins enter a human body, they can wreak havoc upon it, causing “a range of
devastating diseases and defects, such as lung/respiratory disorders, central nervous
system anomalies … depression, heart defects, asthma, skin disorders, memory loss,
immune system suppression, and cancer.”2 Indeed, toxins have been linked to some
of the most serious, debilitating, and life-threatening illnesses, many instances of
which can be prevented through better oversight and testing as well as stronger
measures to limit human exposure.
Joshua Trey Barnett is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, where he
is also a fellow at the Global Change and Sustainability Center. For their support and intellectual generosity on
this project, he thanks Phaedra Pezzullo, Jamie Landau, Leland Spencer, Michelle Ballif, Kathleen de Onís,
Barbara Biesecker, and the two anonymous reviewers. Correspondence to: Joshua Trey Barnett, 255 S. Central
Campus Drive, LNCO 2400, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA. Email: [email protected]
ISSN 0033-5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) © 2015 National Communication Association
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2015.1005121
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406 J. T. Barnett
Because they circulate invisibly, toxins pose a range of challenges for those who
wish to protest their production and dissemination. In fact, four layers of invisibility
confound any efforts at resistance. First, the physical invisibility of toxins opposes
indexical forms of visual depiction. As rhetorical scholar Phaedra C. Pezzullo
contends, “one of the primary constraints for anti-toxic activists is a lack of visual
evidence. If you are familiar with toxins you know that their detection often is not
predicated on sight.”3 Second, when toxins do cause someone to become sick,
symptoms frequently take months or years to manifest.4 It is not uncommon for
victims of toxic exposure to appear perfectly healthy. Third, the pain and suffering
associated with toxins evade both verbal and visual representation. As Elaine Scarry
has written at length, pain and suffering push us up against the limits of
communication by revealing our inability to share precisely what we feel when we
are in pain or when we suffer.5 Fourth, and most troubling, toxins are more likely to
negatively impact politically invisible communities, such as the poor and people of
color.6 Robert Bullard has called these communities “human sacrifice zones,” areas
that are subjected to disproportionate amounts of toxicity.7 Taken together, these four
overlapping layers of invisibility make it exceedingly difficult for activists and
journalists to establish and protest the interconnectedness of toxins, poor health, and
social inequity.
Activists and journalists alike have developed rhetorical strategies to counter the
multiple invisibilities of toxins. One is the “toxic tour,” which Pezzullo defines as
“noncommercial expeditions into areas that are polluted by toxins.”8 By taking
tourists into toxically assaulted communities, activists not only “show” tourists what
these places look like but also enable tourists to feel, hear, and smell what it would be
like to inhabit such a place. Another strategy has been to post photographs on
websites and print them in newsletters alongside verbal accounts of environmental
injustice.9 Although photographs have been criticized for their mediated and,
therefore, limited capacity to capture pain and suffering, especially when compared
to narrative accounts,10 they have been an important rhetorical resource for the
environmental justice movement.
This essay theorizes one form that such photographs take, what I call the “toxic
portrait.” Toxic portraits are one way of making visible the often-pernicious relation
of toxins and human bodies, as well as the pain and suffering this relationality can
entail, visualizations that make it possible for viewers to imagine ways of responding
to such interdependency. As I demonstrate over the course of this essay, toxic
portraits are a visual rhetorical tactic mobilized by activists and journalists that
enables audiences to grasp the relationship between toxic pollution and what Judith
Butler calls the “precariousness of life.”11 The audiences’ capacity to take concrete
measure of this biopolitical–environmental relation is predicated, I suggest, in large
part not only on what the photograph makes visible but also on how it does so. Most
notably, I will argue that toxic portraits speak in what Barbie Zelizer has identified as
the “subjunctive voice of the visual” in order to suggest that toxic exposure might lead
directly to the deaths and dying of individuals.12 By showing individuals—some who
appear healthy and some who obviously do not—against the backdrop of the toxically
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407
assaulted places in which they live, toxic portraits are able to overcome some of the
challenges posed by invisibility and to communicate the potential lethalness of toxic
pollution.
To demonstrate how toxic portraits function rhetorically and how they might
contribute to the creation of a more livable life, this essay moves in the following way:
I begin with a more detailed discussion of how, in cases of environmental injustice,
activists and journalists alike have worked to resist toxic pollution. I then define and
flesh out a theory of “toxic portraits,” paying special attention to their formal features,
not the least of which is the way they speak in the “subjunctive voice.” Having
described the distinguishing features of toxic portraits, I closely examine two of them
with the aim of demonstrating how these photographs resist multiple invisibilities by
showing people in obviously toxic environments. The first portrait is of Suzie
Canales, a well-known environmental justice activist from Corpus Christi, Texas, and
the second is of Horace Smith, a Corpus Christi resident. I focus on these particular
photographs not only because they are among the most widely circulated, but also
because they illustrate the fundamental elements of toxic portraiture. Given that both
photographs were initially posted on the Collaborative on Health and the Environment’s website and were subsequently circulated on more mainstream news websites,
their audience is likely to consist of both people who are already familiar with
environmental justice arguments as well as those who are not. As viewers engage the
subjunctive voice of the toxic portraits, I argue, so too might they begin to imagine
themselves as potentially intervening in the moment of contingency made visible in
these toxic portraits.
Resisting Invisibility and Precariousness
Although invisibility is a problem experienced by many marginalized groups, it is
especially salient in the context of toxic contamination. As noted above, the multiple
invisibilities attending the relationships between toxins and humans provoke activists
and journalists to ask, and offer responses to, difficult questions: How do we
communicate effectively about things others cannot see or feel? Can we provide a
compelling demonstration of the dangers of toxic contamination when physical and
mental illnesses often do not present visible symptoms? How are we to illuminate the
connections between politically marginalized communities and toxic corporate
practices? How might we effectively visualize the everydayness of living in a toxically
assaulted community in ways that do not downplay the threats? Together, these
questions highlight the ways in which invisibility is oftentimes linked to
precariousness.
The invisibilities endemic to toxins have long confounded the capacity of victims of
toxic contamination to establish causal relationships. “Environmental Justice
advocates,” write Jennifer Peeples and Kevin DeLuca, “engage in environmental
conflicts that are plagued with uncertainties, almost all of which work against citizen
activism.”13 The invisibility of toxins is one form of uncertainty faced by
environmental justice advocates that impinges upon their capacity to “prove” that
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408 J. T. Barnett
certain toxins are to blame for particular illnesses. For example, in order to hold
polluters accountable, to receive governmental assistance to clean up sites, and to
provide redress for the bodily harm done to individuals, alleged victims and/or the
activists working on their behalf must prove that their illnesses are directly related to
specific incidents of toxic contamination. But, of course, toxins function within a
complex context that defies the simple relation of cause and effect. What’s more, it is
hard to pinpoint any one cause as the determining factor of illnesses; one’s cancer
might be the cumulative effect of toxic exposure as well as genetics, diet, family
history, and any number of other causes that industry and government might deem
to be “mitigating factors.”14 Indeed, even within other cultural contexts, overdetermination abounds and uncertainty confounds: uncertainty and indeterminacy
challenge activists to find ways of creatively and compellingly representing causal
relationships. Even when toxins’ negative effects on human health are raised for
discussion, the burden of proof (that they exist, that they are harmful) is relegated to
the person or people negatively impacted. The lack of visible evidence, as noted by
Pezzullo, is a problem routinely faced by those seeking redress.
As noted in the introduction, one particularly persuasive response to the invisibility
of toxins and the communities assaulted by them are “toxic tours.” Organized outings
led by local residents that are “aimed at mobilizing public sentiment and dissent
against material and symbolic toxic patterns,” the toxic tours discussed by Pezzullo
combat invisibility by appealing to tourists’ senses.15 For many participants, the very
experience of “being there,” of temporarily immersing themselves in places where
toxins are spewed day in and day out, is powerful since tourists can often smell the
toxins and even feel them working on their bodies. Leaders of toxic tours, who are
themselves often members of the community, share their own knowledge about toxic
environments as they move from site to site, a kind of knowledge that is validated and
legitimized because the participants on the tour can experience, even if only
momentarily, what it is like to live in a toxically assaulted community. Indeed, the
proliferation of toxic tours in recent years speaks to the rhetorical salience of this
activist practice.16
Although co-presence is one of the defining features of toxic tours, Pezzullo also
argues that feelings of presence and identification can be achieved in visually
mediated versions of the tours such as documentary films. Thus, although she moves
us away from the occularcentrism so prevalent in much of the work on tourism by
focusing on the embodied experience of traveling through polluted places, Pezzullo
does not suggest that the visual must or should be evacuated. In fact, she argues that
video toxic tours are “no less significant” than their lived counterparts.17 More to the
point, she contends, “although they do not entail all of the same risks, video toxic
tours do entail the risk of exposing one’s eyes, ears, and self to the choice to become
involved with a place and a people that might otherwise be avoided.”18 In this way,
the video toxic tour “retains the possibility of invoking identification” with
contaminated people and places.19 More recently, Tom Bowers argues in Environmental Communication that satellite imagery might be productively joined with other
media—for example, films, photographs, and written testimony—to “generate the
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20
desired effect of presence.” While neither video toxic tours nor still photographs are
capable of recreating the experience of co-presence on a live toxic tour, these media
nonetheless are able to make palpable the often invisible relationships with toxins in
which people find themselves.
Given that most people cannot—or will not—travel to polluted places, images play
a vital role in the public’s ability to apprehend the precariousness of lives lived in
toxically assaulted communities. But what kind of image will do this work? As Judith
Butler insists in Frames of War, apprehending the precariousness of others’ lives is
predicated on a sense of sociality or interdependency: “Precariousness implies living
socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the
other.”21 For those living in toxically assaulted communities, the lines of interdependence are all too clear: the decision of which factories will be closed (or not),
which environmental regulations will be enforced (or not), and which residents (if
any) will receive compensation for relocation or healthcare ultimately rest in the
hands of others. Thus, victims of toxic contamination must be depicted in ways that
foreground the interconnectedness of human bodies, built environments, and the
toxins that circulate in those spaces. Calling attention to these connections, Butler
argues, may better equip viewers to concretely grasp the ways in which living and
dying are socially facilitated experiences.
In confronting the invisibilities attending toxic contamination, photographs that
expose the precariousness of certain lives also suggest something about the causes of
that precariousness. Whereas toxic tour guides speak to the relationships between
certain industries, governments, and individuals, photographs of those who have been
toxically assaulted often either depict the polluter in their frames or they are
identified in text accompanying the image. Because precariousness implies “living
socially” amongst others who are in positions of more or less power, images seeking
to challenge systems of domination (in the form of corporations and governments
that pollute marginalized communities) routinely attempt to demonstrate how
human bodies are implicated in pernicious social and political relations. By
photographically visualizing or textually identifying these relationships of interdependence and domination, photographs like those discussed in this essay not only
help viewers understand what living in a toxically assaulted community looks like but
also identify a potential point of intervention. In the following section, I trace the
contours of one photographic trope particularly well-suited to make these connections visible within the context of precarious living—the toxic portrait.
Defining Toxic Portraits
Photographs depict things as they were at a particular moment. This was the thesis
advanced by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida.22 In that book he argues that what
photographs are capable of showing is that “the thing has been there.”23 Amongst
many others, Susan Sontag concurs: “Photographs furnish evidence.”24 Is the
photograph of no use then to environmental justice activists whose toxic subject
will never appear as such in the frame? If, as Barthes claims, “Reference … is the
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410 J. T. Barnett
founding order of Photography,” are photographs an appropriate medium for
depicting the invisibilities attending toxins described above?25 Peeples suggests
otherwise by demonstrating that environmentalists have deployed the “toxic sublime”
to considerable effect. According to her, a series of tensions presented in photographs
of toxic landscapes “function[s] to alter the sublime response in order to encourage
contemplation of the viewers’ position within a polluted world.”26 In simultaneously
recognizing the toxicity of a place and appreciating the vista, Peeples argues, viewers
encountering the toxic sublime are likely to question their own complicity in the
creation of a world in which mass environmental degradation persists. More recently,
Peeples has built on her theory of the toxic sublime by conceptualizing a broad class
of what she calls “toxic images” defined as “visual representations that are found in
print or digital media of people, places or toxins, which are used to make claims of
human-produced contamination causing the degradation of the natural (the body or
environment).”27 Peeples usefully analyzes visual narratives whose rhetorical force
congeals around multiple photographs taken and circulated over many years. I wish
to take measure of a singular kind of toxic image, paying attention to the form of the
photograph—the portrait—in order to explain its rhetorical force.
Toxic portraits appear routinely in environmental justice discourses, extending a
long tradition of portraiture’s strategic use within politically charged contexts. In
1944, for example, Jonathan Curvin suggested in the pages of QJS that portraits have
long been understood to convey realistic evidence of a person’s existence.28 As Cara
Finnegan and Rachel Hall note much more recently, portraits were taken by
audiences to reveal the subject’s moral character and, under that assumption, were
often put to nefarious uses.29 In contexts marked by strict racial and class division, for
instance, portraits were used to “prove” the moral and intellectual deficiency of poor
people and people of color. Unlike some reprehensible early uses of portraits, within
the contemporary environmental justice movement, portraits of poor people and
people of color frequently are mobilized to visualize the ways in which toxins produce
precarious lives in poor communities and communities of color. Toxic portraits, as I
define them, are close-up, in situ photographs of people within toxically assaulted
places in which the relationship between pollution and the precariousness of life is
illustrated through a range of visible (industrial, environmental, and corporeal)
referents, accompanied by verbal captions and descriptions, which goad the spectator
to interpret the portrait through the subjunctive voice. Activists and professional
journalists alike invoke this style of portraiture as a way of resisting both the political
invisibility of toxically assaulted communities and the perceptual invisibility of toxins
themselves.
The context or environment in which a portrait is taken fundamentally shapes our
understanding of the pictured person. It is precisely because the subject is
photographed in situ—that is, in a place replete with pollutants—that toxic portraits
enable viewers to see the interdependency of human bodies and toxic landscapes. To
borrow Janet Walker’s words, toxic portraits are a form of “situated testimony”:
Toxic Portraits
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By figuring the relationship among the body of the individual, the ground from
which s/he speaks, and the past events that transpired of a time but are, at the same
time, brought into being by the testimonial act, situated testimony realizes the
materiality of testimony in the power of place.30
Put otherwise, toxic portraits focus attention on the interconnections between the
human bodies and the toxic environments visible in the same frame.
By posing for a portrait in their toxically assaulted communities, subjects of toxic
portraits not only lend their presence but also assert their agency as community
members capable of challenging industrial pollution. Although activists are also
sometimes photographed inside their homes, the relationship between toxins and
precariousness reveals itself most clearly when their bodies are juxtaposed with their
visibly polluted surroundings. In the terms of Danielle Endres and Samantha SendaCook, toxic portraits function as “place-based arguments,” photographs of persons
that “discursively invoke images or memories of a place to support an argument.”31
More than this, however, toxic portraits operate through the logic of “place-asrhetoric” since they rely on the “confluence of physical structures, bodies, and
symbols in particular locations” to “construct the meaning and consequences of a
place.”32 A portrait of an activist standing in front of a Citgo refinery in her
neighborhood, for instance, may shape viewers’ understandings of the convergence of
everyday life, toxins, and the built environment through their display in the same
frame. Insofar as toxic portraits are close-up, in situ photographs of people within
polluted environments, they also make visible potentially pernicious relationships
between bodies and contaminated places.
In addition to displaying activists’ bodies in situ, toxic portraits also suggest the
presence of a number of invisible toxic elements—things present but not visible—
through a combination of visible indexical signs and verbal clues accompanying the
portrait. For example, an obvious visible referent of toxicity, such as a billowing
smoke stack, and a complementary textual description that describe the scene as toxic
together enable viewers to better grasp the invisible toxic relationships depicted by
toxic portraits. Like most photographs, toxic portraits rely on complementary verbal
clues to help viewers imagine the relationships between what can and cannot be
seen.33 In particular, authors of written text accompanying toxic portraits often
identify the potential negative health effects of the industrial landscapes found in the
backgrounds of these photos. For example, in one toxic portrait, a man sits on his
back porch, which is in close proximity to one of Corpus Christi’s many oil refineries.
Notably, the subject’s breathing tube indexes the interconnectedness of human health
and industrial pollution by highlighting one way in which the body is potentially
impinged upon in toxically assaulted places. In the article that frames this photo, the
portrait’s subject explains how he can barely breathe inside his home thanks to the
nearby factories.34
Beyond making invisible relations visible, toxic portraits function within a much
larger field of discourse about pain, suffering, and precariousness, and thus draw on
some of the visual resources employed to communicate other kinds of painful
experiences. As Scarry notes, two metaphors “reappear again and again” in discourses
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412 J. T. Barnett
of pain and suffering: “The first specifies an external agent of the pain, a weapon that is
pictured as producing the pain; and the second specifies bodily damage that is pictured
as accompanying the pain.”35 Weapons—guns, knives, bombs—often represent the
possibility of pain, but it is bodily damage—cuts, missing body parts, blood—that lends
concreteness to the body in pain. In the case of toxic portraits, however, both weapons
and bodily damage are depicted in ways less direct than, say, some well-known images
of torture. For example, the alleged weapon in the most famous photograph from Abu
Ghraib, that of the hooded man, was visible to viewers—the electric wires dangled
from the prisoner’s hands in plain sight. However, the kinds of weapons and bodily
damage look quite different in contexts of toxic contamination. The weapon itself
(in this case, toxins) is too miniscule to be seen and the bodily damage sometimes
presents no outwardly visible signs. Therefore, invisible inner physical or mental
wounds must be made visible through relationships represented in the portraits. For
example, the banality of an oil refinery and the everydayness of a smokestack are made
strange against the depiction of a victim connected to breathing tubes, and the mere
proximity of a child’s body to an oil refinery gives expression to their fateful
interconnectedness. Just as an image of a knife or gun might provoke viewers to
imagine the damage they can inflict, an image of a smokestack may cause viewers to
imagine the malodors and breathing problems associated with pollution. Similarly, an
image of someone breathing with an oxygen tank might provoke viewers to imagine
what it is like to feel as if one cannot breathe well. Though they diverge significantly
from other historical examples, toxic portraits build on a long tactical rhetorical
tradition of showing pain and suffering in the service of social justice.36 Like Scarry’s
linguistic examples, toxic portraits reference certain objects and appearances in order
to help viewers better understand the pain and suffering endured by people living in
toxically assaulted communities.
By showing people who have been negatively impacted by toxins, toxic portraits
invite viewers to relate both to the human subject of the photograph and to the toxic
conditions to which they bear witness. Thus, toxic portraits invite viewers to
apprehend the subjects’ lives as precarious and to identify not only with an individual
person but also with a sense that their precariousness may be shared.37 In other
words, the form of the toxic portrait depicts not only a person, but also a person who
is located within a particular context or condition that is the consequence of certain
political, economic, and social relations. Ariella Azoulay’s work on the “civil contract
of photography” is instructive here.38 Azoulay argues that, “When the assumption is
that not only were the photographed people there, but that, in addition, they are still
present there at the time I’m watching them, my viewing of these photographs is less
susceptible to becoming immoral.”39 What Azoulay suggests is that spectators can
enter into a collaborative relationship with the subject of a photograph when they
recognize that it depicts not only the past but an ongoing present.
The viewers’ ability to relate to toxic portraits in this way is dependent on the
juxtaposition of human bodies and toxic environments, of ordinary people living in
banal conditions that are made to seem extraordinary. Moreover, as Gunther Kress
and Theo van Leeuwen argue, images in which the eyes of the subject are directed at
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Toxic Portraits
413
the spectator make “demands” on the viewer. The precise kind of demand issued
depends on the pictured person (or animal, or anthropomorphized object); nonetheless it “demands something from the viewer, demands that the viewer enter into
some kind of imaginary relation with him or her.”40 Here, again, an example is in
order: in another toxic portrait, an older woman named María Jiménez stands on a
hillside near Houston, Texas, while two smokestacks in the near distance, partly
obscured by trees, send toxic smoke into the sky.41 As the toxic smoke spews from
the towers, it drifts toward Jiménez and passes behind her. The conditions viewers
witness in this toxic portrait, paired with Jiménez’s defiant look, invite them to attend
to the life of the subject, underscoring the ways in which her living and dying are
connected to environmental conditions. Indeed, in toxic portraits we see that who the
subjects are is in some significant sense predicated on the presence of toxins in their
community; rather than attempting to separate the two, toxic portraits show humans
and toxic environments just as they are: coexisting in the same places.
Most importantly, toxic portraits goad viewers to interpret them within the
“subjunctive voice” of the visual. Zelizer describes the subjunctive in this way:
“Usually signified in verbal language by auxiliaries such as ‘might,’ ‘could,’ or ‘should,’
by the substitution of ‘would have’ for ‘had’ and by the use of ‘if’ clauses, depiction in
images adds impulses of supposal, hypothesis, and possibility to photographic
verisimilitude.”42 The subjunctive voice of the visual, then, is predicated on a sense
of uncertainty. Such uncertainty, Zelizer argues, translates into contingency and
mutability, both of which enable viewers to imagine that the photograph is an
incomplete account of what will have happened after its taking.43 The moment
depicted in subjunctive photographs is thus incomplete and open to multiple
interpretations. In other words, by depicting a moment of uncertainty, toxic portraits
invite spectators to raise questions about what is shown, to consider what happened
before and after the photograph was taken, and to imagine a range of potential and
possible responses to what they are seeing. Such photographs, Zelizer writes, activate
an “as if” perspective that “creates a space of possibility, hope, and liminality through
which spectators might relate to images.”44 The subjunctive voice of the visual,
according to Zelizer, is a grammar of hope capable of suggesting multiple and
contingent futures as it negotiates the conditional and wishful, the dependent and
emotional, and the various possibilities embedded within a single image of, for
instance, a suffering, dying human being.
Zelizer writes extensively about such photographs in About to Die, offering a close
study of how photographs of people who are “about to die” create the conditions of
possibility for spectators to respond (or to imagine themselves responding) to the
dying body.45 These photographs are powerful, Zelizer argues, because “they build on
the blunt force of photographic depiction—its concretization of the here and now—
and soften that force with qualifiers that are suggestive of possibility, contingency,
and hypothesis.”46 Put another way, “about to die” photographs depict real bodies in
potentially dangerous situations, thereby suggesting that death is a possible outcome.
Yet, because the subjects of these images have not yet succumbed to whatever
threatens to kill them, a sense of contingency and mutability is maintained.
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414 J. T. Barnett
Toxic portraits work this way as well: they depict people in places and situations
wherein toxic, deadly chemicals abound, places where death and dying are not
uncommon. And yet, precisely because the subjects of these portraits are living and
present within these places, they also suggest the possibility of other futures. The
generic form of toxic portraits thus resembles and complicates the “about to die” image.
Toxic portraits work at the interface of presumption and possibility. Zelizer
distinguishes between three types of “about to die” subjunctive photographs: those
of presumed death, those of possible death, and those of certain death. “Images
of presumed death,” she argues, “signal impending death through inanimate
landscapes—fallen buildings, devastated physical settings, and crushed structures—
but no people about to die.”47 That is to say, “presumed death” is signaled through
objects and scenes that are associated with death and dying. In contradistinction,
images of “possible death” activate the subjunctive through inference based on the
frailty of human bodies that are shown by relating them to “famine, illness, planned
violence, torture, mass extermination, epidemic—all circumstances in which death
occurs to multiple individuals over a prolonged period of time.”48 Images of possible
death neither confirm nor deny that the pictured person died after the photograph
was taken, but they do suggest that the possibility exists because of the conditions in
which the image was produced. Operating in the space between these two types
(presumption and possibility), toxic portraits depict both the conditions of dying so
prevalent in images of presumed death and the frail or possibly frail bodies of the
people living in conditions of possible death.
Notably, photographs in the subjective mode invite spectators to imagine what it
would mean to intervene.49 In the case of toxic portraits, the moment captured might
best be conceptualized by the moniker “about to / die?” In this revised construction of
Zelizer’s concept, the conditions of contingency and death are maintained yet
separated, thus denaturalizing the relationship between the two. Furthermore, the
potentially lethal relationship between toxins and death is raised as a question, which
sheds light on the mutability of the toxic conditions that produce precarious lives. In
other words, although the connections between toxins and death are real, material
conditions, they exist in a relation that could be changed.
“About to / die?” is a particularly important construct for victims of environmental
injustices whose living and dying are not easily distinguished through visual media
and often persist over time. Since, for instance, the toxic backdrop of a factory or
refinery is not always assumed to be deadly in the same way that a gunshot is, antitoxic activists face the unique challenge of demonstrating the seriousness of their own
precarious situations. Toxic portraits depict uncertainty through the visualized
relationships between human bodies, built environments, and the toxins that circulate
within them. As a visual heuristic, then, “about to / die?” invites viewers to recognize
the precariousness of life presented in the image and opens the time and space for
response. To demonstrate the rhetorical force of toxic portraits, I turn next to an
analysis of two toxic portraits of activists from Corpus Christi, Texas. Before turning
to the close readings, I provide a brief but necessary background about each of the
subjects.
Toxic Portraits
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Reading Toxic Portraits
The first toxic portrait I analyze is of Suzie Canales. Canales is famous for being an
outspoken cafeteria worker-turned-environmental justice crusader from Texas. When
her sister, Diana Bazan, died at age 42 from breast cancer, Canales set out to
demonstrate the link between her toxic neighborhood in Corpus Christi and the
failing health of her sister and neighbors by conducting studies and sharing stories of
sickness. Still living in one of Corpus Christi’s fence-line communities—neighborhoods situated very close to factories, plants, refineries, and the like, often separated
by little more than a fence—Canales and other Latina/o citizens decided that the
pollution could no longer be ignored. Moreover, Canales discovered that her family’s
location near the plants was not coincidental but, rather, the determined outcome of
the city government’s zoning policies, which designated certain areas as “reserved for
Mexicans.”50 In response, Canales initially formed a group of community members
who took part in air and soil sampling, which was instrumental in obtaining a federal
indictment and eventual conviction of a Citgo Petroleum Corporation plant in
Corpus Christi—“a landmark case for environmental enforcement.”51
Although Canales has posed for a number of photographs, one notable toxic
portrait has circulated across an array of media. Steve Lerner, environmental
journalist and author of Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure
in the United States, took a portrait of Canales (Figure 1) while he was on a trip to
Corpus Christi to interview local activists and citizens. In the portrait, Canales is in
the very center, standing in a street, wearing a floral print top and dangling earrings.
Only her upper body is visible in the shot. Lips closed tightly and eyes squinting back
at the camera through rays of sun, Canales appears calm but discontented. The treelined street extends behind her, bordered by patches of grass, power line poles, and
hints of chain link fencing. The greenery of the street meets with an industriallooking background, complete with refinery towers and smokestacks reaching
ominously up into a placid blue sky. Although no smoke billows from the towers
behind Canales in this portrait, they are nonetheless evocative of similar, familiar
scenes of industrialized areas.
As with all toxic portraits, Canales is shown in situ, the rhetorical impact of which
is manifold. By visualizing Canales’s body in such close proximity to the oil refinery,
for instance, the portrait visualizes one of the primary concerns of environmental
justice activists—namely, the closeness of human communities to sources of
pollution. Canales cannot be more than 100 yards away from the plant in the
background, and very little separates her vulnerable body from the toxins presumably
emanating from it. The formal standards of portraiture dictate that the subject is
shown in the foreground, appearing large within the photograph’s frame. The plant
in the background of Canales’s toxic portrait seems equally large, though farther
away, thereby underscoring the proximity of Canales’s body to the source of
pollution. In this way the portrait not only renders the source of pollution visible and
locatable but also suggests the interdependency of human bodies, built environments,
and toxins. The factory stands in for the unseen toxins floating about in the air, and
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Figure 1 Suzie Canales, founder of the Corpus Christi-based Citizens for Environmental Justice, standing near one of many refineries in the area. Photograph by Steve
Lerner.52
Canales, positioned precariously close to the source, embodies the chief complaint of
toxically assaulted communities—the pollution is simply too close to home.
Although Canales’s proximity to the factory is made visible in the photograph, it is
the relationship between image and text that enables viewers to make sense of the
significance of the closeness pictured in the portrait. For example, in the
accompanying article on the Collaborative on Health and the Environment website,
with which this toxic portrait was first published, Lerner offers historical evidence of
the ongoing struggles of those, like Canales, who live in toxically assaulted
communities. “[Canales’s home] was located adjacent to two oil waste dumps that
later were used as municipal garbage landfills,” he writes. “One of these near the
Canales homestead was the 47-acre Greenwood hazardous waste dump.”53 Lerner
elaborates by historicizing Canales’s geographic relationship with sources of
pollution. It is no coincidence, Lerner informs readers, that Canales’s Latina body
occupies this toxic scene. Lerner goes on to report that although the zoning laws in
Corpus Christi were eventually recognized as racist and banned by the court, many
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communities remain racially segregated. Thus, while the toxic portrait is successful in
demonstrating proximity, it is through the relation of image and text that the
specificity of Canales’s enduring struggles become clear. That is, although the
proximity pictured in the portrait does visualize the primary complaint of
environmental justice activists, the accompanying story better equips viewers to
make sense of why Canales is shown in this way. The background information on
Canales presented in the article helps to reveal some of the invisible relationships that
are present in the toxic portrait, such as Canales’s lifelong struggle with toxins, her
personal connections to this place, and the racial politics that produced her
precarious proximity to pollution.
Together, both the toxic portrait and Lerner’s article serve another important
purpose: to make visible the costs of environmental degradation and racist zoning
laws on the body. On the one hand, Canales’s body is made to stand in for her dead
sister, who, as a resident of the Baldwin Hills neighborhood, occupied the same space.
In the many news articles written about Canales’s activism, her environmental justice
work is almost always situated within the context of her sister’s death. Lerner
characterized the origins of Canales’s activism this way:
Ready to retire from the Navy and settle in New England, Canales received word from
her family in Corpus Christi that her older sister, Diana Bazan, 42, was dying with
stage-four breast cancer that had metastasized to the brain. Quickly changing plans,
Canales returned home to attend to her sister who died on December 29, 1999.54
Though Bazan can no longer stand near the refineries, Canales and reporters alike
evoke the story of her sister’s death to advance claims about toxic contamination in
Corpus Christi. By rhetorically suturing Canales’s body to her sister’s, Lerner and
others link the proximity that is pictured through the body in situ to the possibility of
death and dying. On the other hand, Canales’s body and the environment it is shown
in visualize the precariousness of living in toxically assaulted places. The figure of the
factory in the background, for instance, works enthymematically to contextualize
Canales’s risky position. Like the weapon metaphors discussed by Scarry, the factory
embodies the potential for bodily damage since it is associated with smoke and smells
that sicken the body. Whether or not one reads the accompanying narrative, then, the
toxic portrait of Canales invites viewers to consider the links between human health,
built environments, and the toxins that circulate within them.
Depicting the body in a potentially dangerous place also invites viewers to interpret
the toxic portrait through the subjunctive mode, thereby enabling them to imagine
that Canales is in a condition of possible death. Specifically, the context in the
photograph portrays a subject who is enduring the slow process of toxification that
eventually leads to death.55 Given the textual framing of the photograph, which
demonstrates the potentially lethal effects of toxic pollution, Canales’s presence near
the refinery demonstrates that she is both persisting in a toxic environment and also
potentially deteriorating as a result. While her body shows no outward signs of illness
caused by toxins, it does demonstrate that bodies are interdependent with the
environments they inhabit, and thus suggests (rather than confirms) that Canales is
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418 J. T. Barnett
living a precarious life. Viewers can infer the potential effects of this interdependency
by comparing this portrait to any number of others they have seen where subjects are
pictured in places that are assumed to be healthy and comfortable; in most portraits,
the context does not raise questions about the subject’s health. Thus pictured,
Canales’s living and dying become a part of what it means to inhabit this place: to live
here, the portrait implies, is also to suffer and die here.
But in identifying and visualizing a causal relationship by juxtaposing human
bodies and toxic polluters, the photograph does not simply foreclose on Canales’s
living. That is to say, it also presents the possibility for change—neither Canales nor
the pollution needs to occupy the same space. Understood in the subjunctive mode,
the toxic portrait of Canales offers spectators an opportunity to ponder “what if?”
Certain questions arise: Would Canales be living or working near this factory if she
were of European American descent? If the factory were closed or cleaned up would
the community be more suitable for human inhabitation? Or, might Canales simply
move away from it? Although these questions oversimplify any action oriented
toward changing Canales’s living conditions, they do point to a range of possibilities
indicated by the syntax of the portrait: Although the portrait portrays a moment prior
to death, it does not depict the moment before death. Unlike the photographs taken of
people jumping from the World Trade Center, the photograph of Canales cannot
confirm the question of death and dying. To be sure, Canales is at risk, but her
healthy-looking body makes it impossible to determine how long she has to live. To
the contrary, the portrait captures a moment in which circumstances can be altered
before she dies. In short, by suspending time at the point at which her fate has yet to
be sealed, the toxic portrait of Canales opens a space for viewers to imagine
alternative futures for the activist, futures that would minimize the precariousness of
her life. The moment captured in this portrait can thus be grasped as what Zelizer
calls a “space of possibility, hope, and liminality through which spectators might
relate to images.”56
By depicting the human body as precarious, toxic portraits make strikingly visible
the significant yet often unseen and unrecognized consequences of human suffering
vis-à-vis toxins. While photographs of visibly healthy activists like Canales standing
near refineries depict the precariousness of lives lived near factories, other toxic
portraits illustrate even more dire situations, situations in which death seems more
probable. Like the images of possible death described by Zelizer, these toxic portraits
draw on the frail body as a way of signifying the likelihood of death.57 Shown in a
way that highlights the vulnerability of the human body and its interconnectedness to
those people and things around it, images of possible death invite viewers to consider
what might be done to alleviate the pain and suffering the subject might be
experiencing.
Toxic portraits of unhealthy bodies combine what Scarry calls the weapon with the
force of bodily damage. Shown together in the same photograph, the weapon and
bodily damage choreograph a complex invitation to imagine the depicted body as
living a precarious life, but also a life that could be altered through social and political
action. The second toxic portrait shows an unhealthy body in a toxically polluted
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place. The subject of this toxic portrait is Horace Smith, a longtime resident of the
Hillcrest neighborhood in Corpus Christi.58 Smith suffered through the pains of
living in a community replete with benzene and hexane, and his body bore the marks
of prolonged exposure to these pollutants. Smith, an African American whose home
was just two street blocks away from the Flint Hills Resources refinery, consequently
needed an oxygen tank to breathe. The air pollution was so severe, and his body so
sensitive to the toxins, that even when he was inside his home, Smith needed the
breathing apparatus to survive. “The life is being sucked right out of us,” Smith told
Lerner.59 What Smith means, of course, is both material and metaphoric: the
experience of living in a toxically assaulted community impacts one both psychologically and physically. Whereas Canales’s body does not bear obvious visual marks of
toxic exposure, Smith’s body visibly records one of the effects of living amidst toxins:
the loss of one’s ability to breathe well.60
During one interview, Lerner took a photo of Smith at his home near the refinery
(Figure 2) and the portrait was published in Lerner’s original report for the
Collaborative on Health and the Environment.61 The photograph of Smith adheres
to the formal characteristics of toxic portraits defined above. Much like the portrait of
Canales, Smith is positioned front and center in the photograph. Unlike Canales,
however, Smith bears his unclothed chest, his body dwarfed by the surrounding
environment and cut off below the shoulders by the camera. Smith’s dark skin
contrasts with the green and blue of the background, and his greying hair and
moustache signal his age. An oxygen tube reaches up from its tank below, wraps
around his thick neck, weaves up behind his ears, and pushes clean air into his
nostrils as he squints through his glasses at the camera. Though the portrait is slightly
Figure 2 Horace Smith struggling to breathe at his home in Corpus Christi, which is
located within close proximity to a refinery. Photograph by Steve Lerner.62
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420 J. T. Barnett
blurry, viewers can easily make out the refinery towers that reach up above the
treeline and into the slightly cloudy blue sky.
By depicting Smith within the toxically assaulted community of Flint Hills, the
toxic portrait establishes the interconnectedness of his body to the built environment.
By doing so, this toxic portrait of Smith shows one acute consequence of pollution,
namely a respiratory disorder that makes breathing difficult. Setting Smith’s
unhealthy body in the foreground and the refinery in the background, the portrait
depicts the relationship between the smokestacks and the breathing apparatus. That is
to say, the juxtaposition establishes a causal relationship between the industrial
facilities and Smith’s illness. This relationship is important for victims of environmental injustices who often confront skepticism when they claim that certain illnesses
are the result of corporate and governmental neglect or, even worse, intentional
discrimination.
Furthermore, the juxtaposition is accompanied by text, which helps viewers make
sense of the interconnections depicted in the toxic portrait. As Lerner’s article makes
clear, Smith’s life in Corpus Christi was in some significant sense defined by his
proximity to the Flint Hills refinery. Even in his own home, Smith was subject to the
debilitating effects of toxic pollution. Lerner writes: “‘We are stuck here. This is all we
have,’ Smith adds gesturing vaguely at the small wooden house where the smell of
benzene and sulfur dioxide permeate the room stinging the eyes and irritating the
back of the throat.”63 Smith’s body is described as fully enveloped by the encroaching
industry under whose shadow he and his wife lived, the totalizing effects of
toxification represented by the oxygen tube that wraps around his head like a rope
binding him to the refineries.
The toxic portrait of Smith also displays the ways in which human bodies malinger
in such toxic environments. Zelizer has rightly noticed that images of frail bodies
appear frequently in news stories, serving as evidence of “illness, malnutrition,
accidents, epidemics, [and] starvation.”64 Moreover, “[l]ike other images of possible
death, these images showcase people in circumstances in which they malinger,
suggesting but not confirming that they die.”65 In other words, the frail or obviously
ill body is a symbol of possible death, but one that can never verify for the viewer that
the subject has, indeed, passed away. The portrait of Smith’s unhealthy body
continues this tradition by illustrating the frailty of a man plagued by the polluting
industries surrounding him.
But Smith’s portrait diverges in at least one sense from Zelizer’s conceptualization
of photos of frail bodies: Contrary to her generalization that in these images “[l]ittle
denotative detail is provided about the causal circumstance behind the malfunctioning body, and the images and their captions focus instead on bodily frailty as an event
in and of itself,”66 the visual and textual details captured in the toxic portrait of Smith
offer a vivid picture of the struggles he endured as a resident of the Hillcrest
neighborhood. Smith’s unhealthy body is positioned not far from a polluting refinery,
he breathes with the assistance of an oxygen tube, and his unclothed body is left
exposed to the polluted environment that he inhabits. In fact, Smith’s unclothed body
may even be seen as a metaphor for the broader exposure that poor people and
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people of color often endure in toxically assaulted communities. Without protections
from government, and oftentimes intentionally exposed, these communities are
particularly susceptible to the negative health effects of toxins.
Like the toxic portrait of Canales, the photograph of Smith invites viewers to
interpret it in the subjunctive mode—as an image of possible death. It is precisely this
characteristic that lends “as if” photos their rhetorical power and, in this particular
case, makes the portrait of Smith a site of potentiality rather than certainty. The toxic
portrait activates an “as if” perspective, which is to say it invites viewers to imagine
what life might be like for Smith if Flint Hills had not located so close to his home, if
the city had not created racist zoning laws that enabled this proximity, and if the
refinery had taken measures to reduce the air pollution that made it impossible for
Smith to breathe in his own home. At the time of its taking Smith was not so far gone
that his life could not have been saved.67 Indeed, it is precisely because the conditions
of Smith’s living and dying are not yet fixed in the portrait—he does not appear to be
fully living or fully dying—that viewers might imagine themselves responding to his
precariousness. Yes, viewers see Smith malingering in a toxic environment, but the
portrait also enables them to see that, as the saying goes, he’s not dead yet. It is in this
space of contingency that intervention becomes possible.
Seeing the Moment, Seizing the Moment
Standing in front of one of Corpus Christi’s many oil refineries, Susie Canales stares
back at the camera with grimacing discontent. Sitting on his back porch Horace
Smith, aided by an oxygen tank, struggles to breath thanks to the nearby refineries.
This is the site/sight of environmental injustice, and scenes like these are found in
photographs from isolated rural towns and bustling metropolitan cities in the United
States and across the globe. By picturing human bodies in toxically assaulted places,
toxic portraits like these resist multiple invisibilities. Together with textual narratives,
toxic portraits make visible the interconnections between human bodies, toxic
pollution, and the pain and suffering that frequently result from their combination.
However, toxic portraits also invite us to consider the provisional and mutable nature
of the precarious lives produced in toxically assaulted communities. When we read
these portraits as subjunctive photos, what we see is the precariousness of life, and
what is offered to us as viewers is an opportunity to intervene. In other words, toxic
portraits depict a moment of precarious living, but this moment does not foreclose
political and social action. Instead, by showing subjects who are understood to be
malingering in toxic environments, new opportunities for ordinary citizens to
imagine themselves interrupting dangerous cycles of toxic contamination emerge.
Since it is difficult to see either toxins or the physical and mental effects they
produce, activists and journalists create and circulate toxic portraits to demonstrate
the interconnectedness of human bodies, built environments, and toxins. By showing
both healthy- and unhealthy-looking bodies in toxically assaulted communities, toxic
portraits make it more difficult for viewers to ignore these relations while making it
easier for them to imagine interdependency as a lived condition. By presenting a
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422 J. T. Barnett
series of visible indexical signs, multiple invisibilities attending environmental
injustice come into view in toxic portraits. Not only bodies and factories but also
oxygen tubes, smoke, and chain-link fencing call attention to the ways in which
toxins destroy lives and livelihoods. Delivered in the subjunctive mode, toxic portraits
open a space for viewers to imagine otherwise, to imagine themselves responding to
the precariousness depicted in these portraits.
By opening a space of contingency, toxic portraits invite viewers to respond
(or consider responding) to the pernicious pattern of toxic contamination. Responding to precariousness is an essential element in a broader struggle to eliminate certain
forms of socially facilitated forms of living and dying that pervade contemporary
societies. As Butler asserts, “Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to
care for that being so that it may live.”68 By making these particular and precarious
lives visible, toxic portraits invite spectators to imagine the living and dying of their
subjects beyond the time of the image’s capture, to think of an alternative to the
framework of unending industrialization and the pollution that is only one of its
harmful consequences. Although I have begun the work of both fleshing out a
concept of toxic portraits and demonstrating the rhetorical significance of these
photographs, there is more work to be done. The nature of toxic portraits demands
that we continue to question what they reveal to us, to be responsive to the
contingency that is their raison d’être, and to follow up each time we ask, what if?
When confronted with the question, “About to / die?,” toxic portraits empower us to
not only see the moment of possibility but to seize it as well.
Notes
[1] See Sheila Kaplan, “EPA Develops Neurotoxicants List, New Testing,” Investigative
Reporting Workshop (December 22, 2010), accessed May 31, 2014, http://investigativereporti
ngworkshop.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.
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[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
424 J. T. Barnett
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[37]
[38]
[39]
[40]
[41]
[42]
[43]
[44]
[45]
[46]
[47]
[48]
[49]
[50]
[51]
[52]
[53]
[54]
[55]
[56]
[57]
[58]
[59]
[60]
[61]
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.
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.
Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008).
Azoulay, Civil Contract of Photography, 16.
Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2nd
edition) (London, UK: Routledge, 2006), 118.
“Manchester: An Environmental Battleground,” Earth First! Newsline (December 31, 2012),
accessed January 30, 2013, http://earthfirstnews.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/manchester
demand/.
Zelizer, “Voice of the Visual,” 163.
Barbie Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010).
Zelizer, “Voice of the Visual,” 163.
Zelizer, About to Die, 6.
Zelizer, “Voice of the Visual,” 165.
Zelizer, About to Die, 76.
Zelizer, About to Die, 123.
See, for instance, Michelle Murray Yang, “Still Burning: Self-Immolation as Photographic
Protest,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 1 (2011): 1–25.
Steve Lerner, Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 99.
Ari Phillips, “Walking the Fence Line,” Texas Observer (March 2, 2011), accessed October 31,
2012, http://www.texasobserver.org/walking-the-fence-line/.
Lerner, “Corpus Christi.”
Lerner, “Corpus Christi.”
Lerner, “Corpus Christi.”
For an insightful discussion of “slow death” see Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 95–120.
Zelizer, “Voice of the Visual,” 163.
Zelizer, About to Die, 123.
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/.
Lerner, “Corpus Christi.”
Lerner, Sacrifice Zones, 106.
Lerner, “Corpus Christi.”
Toxic Portraits
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[62]
[63]
[64]
[65]
[66]
[67]
[68]
Lerner, “Corpus Christi.”
Lerner, “Corpus Christi.”
Zelizer, About to Die, 149.
Zelizer, About to Die, 151.
Zelizer, About to Die, 149.
See Yang, “Still Burning,” for more on this idea.
Butler, Frames of War, 14.
425