I find this article crucial for thinking through any ethnographic work, but especially for visual representations of toxicity. The question of representation in visual material is just as important, if not more so in some instances, than that in text. There is a certain "excess" to visual material, the likes of which can either powerfully evoke ethnographic questions or else perpetuate a violent ethnographic gaze. It also requires thinking through how visual materials produced by the ethnographer has the risk of engaging in what Todd defines as supranthropology, the likes of which results when a "scholar forgets the consequences of speaking of/for/about people rather than focusing on our responsibilities, always and everywhere, to build relationships with time, place, stories people." Without building these relationships and getting to know the people we are working with, how can we hope to visualize the places in which they reside and work? Any visualization, whether a camera, map, graph, etc. is a very political and selective tool: it zooms in on what the anthropologist preferences while excluding multiple other angles, objects, landscapes, numbers, contours, geographies, etc. Without these relationships, what business do we have visualizing? How are we to determine where the toxicities lie for the people we work with, as opposed to imposing our own assumptions about what toxicity means to them? Toxicity for whom? How do we avoid engaging in what Todd critiques as the propensity for anthropologists to presume that they know more than the people they are working with, and how do we risk reflecting this in our visualizations?
