Almost Banal

Interestingly enough, the freeway was least significant as a visual focal point. To me, the structure of the fence, the trees, and the blue skies factored more prominently than the freeway. The centrality of the freeway to this ethnographic site came more from Ariel’s descriptive summary and not initially from the image itself. My gaze initially gravitated upward towards the iron fence. It reminded me of prison barbed wire, the U.S.-Mexico border[lands], and my own work in Palestine-Israel. The fence as a marker of separation, figurative and literal, captured my attention more so than the freeway beneath it- despite the fact that the freeway itself acts as a separator as well. The perspective from the lens makes it such that the freeway exists at a distance, evoking a form of detachment from the position of the viewer. Thus, the fence obstructs and somehow limits the ultimate (visual) toxicity resulting from the freeway below. It perhaps guards the freeway. After the iron fence, my initial views focused on the surrounding trees, again, they too, act as deflectors from the freeway. The trees produce an environmental counter-narrative that is only challenged by the pollutants resulting from the toxins released into the air and soil. The trees offer an aesthetic to the toxicity that, at least ostensibly, lessen the environmental harms. Like the trees, another natural backdrop is the bright blue, Southern California sky that overwhelms the image. Its perfected hues of blue obscure the invisible toxins weighing its atmospheric layers. The fence, the trees, and the sky work to make distant the freeway. It does nothing. In fact, offers a solution, a livelihood connecting folks from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’. Almost banal.