This image is a found image. It is a metonym of a mode of black life in early settling of Los Angeles as well as a metonym of the exclusions of the archive.
Found image, book cover.
Aesthetic - it connects the broader project to a discursive realm of activists, characters, and stories around toxicity in relation to Formosa.
Google Earth and ethnographer's own.
The image on the right is fairly low quality. Are there better versions? The images themselves don't complement each other too well side by side, but as I say in another comment, I like the style of the image on the left as a hidden camera 'got you' image, which is especially interesting as it came from google maps.
The image is found, from https://www.brmi.online/lymph?lightbox=dataItem-jk75ve9g.
The nature of the image (a watercolour painting) is such that it adds a poeticness to the caption. It represents the caption well.
This is a found image, which the ethnographer describes as a 'go to' slide from the City of Austin's repository of project slides. There are several notable things about this image: the first is the connotation of powerpoint slides, which imply an institutional knowledge of an issue; the second is the inclusion of stick figures and apple trees to communicate a complex issue 'simply', which implies an ability to understand an issue and to do something about it. The aesthetic sits between communicative and intentional: this is what the problem is and we know what we need to do to address it (if you keep watching this presentation, all the stick figures will be in the same position and you will understand the issue and how it is going to be fixed). The ethnographer's inclusion of this image and his caption implies the failure of the administrative body to understand and frame racial inequality. It promotes a critical gaze which undermines blind faith in institutional bodies and their projects.
This image seems to have been created by the ethnographer. Its scale of attention and composition focuses on the old woman's body - in a strong stance of protest. The ethnographer thereby highlights the significance of the human body in political-administrative and industrial processes, or the imposition of such processes on the human body, and the attempt of the human to impose herself back onto these processes.
The image is a found image, taken from a news website. The image is carefully cropped, so that the 'trending stories' sidebar is included. The composition therefore encourages distraction away from the main article, towards other things happening simultaneously. The aesthetic is a kind of popular culture aesthetic, which evokes the mechanical response of clicking through, exploring new articles, and not staying for long in one place.
This is an image taken by the ethnographer and zooms into the 1m measurement of the soil. It doesn't show the layers in the soil to the readers but this is explained in the caption.
The image is created by the ethnographer. It shows a lush green forest, which seems counterintuitive to the kind of toxicity and contamination in the place. It also shows two humans in the forest, standing at two different locations, and seemingly separated spatially--a forest and a clearing. It would be interesting to highlight the toxicity at play through the image some more. Is there a way to show the liminality of farm vs wild, and contamination vs decontaminated spaces across the space and in terms of depth?
The image itself is created by the ethnographer. It seems like a snapshot, not particularly thoughtfully composed, but capturing an important moment. The haze is apparent in the atmospheric perspective of the surrounding jungle. I am struck by the lack of hurriedness of the fire-starter. He is relaxed and seems to be moving slowly through a routine that has come to shock the outside world only recently.