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Less the image and more the critical commentary interpellated me as a woman/feminist: the details re the gendered division of labor in Madre Del Dios into miners and sex workers was artfully drawn out vis-a-vis the imagery on the bottle.  The image itself first hailed me as a drinker of beverages from bottles; only the critical commentary helped hail me as a thinker on topics re (metal/mercury) toxicity's re sexualization/eroticism of mortal danger and risk and the relation to gendered labor forms in the region.

Eye goes from lower right (with the bottle) to the horizon, aka the muddy water.  The critical essay pulls me back to the specifics of the bottle's illustration, in (deliberate?) parallel to the way the sequence of the first image--It's Elemental--to the second image--Matador--also moves focus from the global to the local field site.  

Toxicity moves from mercury as chemical toxicant affecting nervous system of humans to the toxicity of (implicit) waves of colonization/imperialism with their imported gendered systems of manliness and capitalist extraction.  The matador-bull fight art form/ritual is juxtaposed in the essay, implicitly, to the art form (center of gratuitous expenditure) that is (Swiss designed) remediation science.

The image is ethnographic in that it is representative of a compounding of components at a single field site. To the design statement I would add a statement regarding the photographer's choice to foreground the bottle of mercury (with the mine in the background). What does this spatial representation do for the reading of the image? 

The image's subject seems to be mercury - though one would argue from the textual description that the subject is in fact the bodies that come into contact with this (seemingly invisible, harmless, beautiful) substance. 

I think it would be helpful to contextualize and clarify the specific image in greater detail - to walk the viewer through the landscape (imagry) that is being presented. Is the mud common? Is this a specific  brand of mercury? does that matter?

My favorite thing about the succession of images from number 1 to number 2 is the way the upper greyness and lower redness rhymed. The two business services purport to do absolutely opposite work (cleanup vs. pollution) and yet the accidental convergence of design illustrates how they are both invested in sustaining the same negative ecological paradigm. Bravo! That said, the shift from two portraits to a landscape is disorienting. I'd stick with portrait for the third, which you can do simply by editing the third into a portrait.

Toxic masculinity! Toxic humanism! Right on, that's clever, but go ahead and make the message even more explicit. This is where photo alteration can add even more to your work. Look for some of those horrific bullfighting images you see circulating in the PETA circles online. More people should see what the killing of their food looks like anyway. But even more importantly, teach people to make connections between the brands around them all the time and visual association. I'm writing this on a MacBook right now, a machine that came with the image of an apple with a bite taken out of it.

When in the past I have been around toxic substances, especially liquids like solvents and the like, I have interacted with this material in the anthropoligical sense of the taboo. Your interest in masculinity raises the question of toxics of the body, rather than just toxics outside the body. By that I mean public health discourse about both disease-bearing living pathogens and waste products. The way these men spoke so callously about the mercury's beauty reminds me of this recent trend in masculinity, both straight and gay, to celebrate and to cherish men's semen.