I love how this image sinks us into the materiality of archiving a complex environmental problem. It communicates a "david vs. goliath" situation and forces us to imagine the enormity of information and knowledge that must be processed to politically contend with the chemical industry.
I think you can reframe the caption into ethnographic writing (right now its a bit self-conscious), so that you describe Wilma, her history of engagement, and what these papers represent to her and the history of the case (and why paper not digital?) and then broadening out to your wider questions about archiving the anthropocene and its political stakes.
This is a photograph, not taken by the author. The composition is very helpful in communicating ethnographic scale and the character of the subject. I find it aesthetically very engaging.
This visualization conveys ethnographic insight on a variety of levels. Using a photo of a woman’s one-stop archival shop allows the contributor to scale the conversation from these masses of printed paper to larger conversations around archival and data practices in not only environmental justice circles, but also academic spaces.
Only what I said above about the caption's tone.
My mind is floating to paranoa. The paranoid style—a form of thinking often pushed to the margins—is part and parcel with the epistemology of the humanities and social sciences more generally. AND maybe of tireless researches like Wilma in the photo? Though some are institutionalized for questioning the truth as given, something which is clearly articulated in Jonathan Metzl’s “The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became A Black Disease,” others, such as university professors, build their careers off of this skepticism. What are the dynamics at play here? Racialized? Gendered?
Photograph. The vantage point of the photo is very interesting.. We can sort of feel the distance between us “the viewer” and Wilma and the heaps of documents that seperate us. Maybe a metaphor for activism work? Or the space between the corporation and X (substitute activists, fenceline communities, workers, etc.). Actually getting to Wilma seems inaccessible via this photograph. Getting to the expert or the expertise. The distance really is the most notable aspect of the photo.
The distance is really genius here, but I wonder if you could use blurring techniques to focus in on Wilma more or even the documents. Or if you could play a bit with the blank wall space off to the left. If the focus is on the sort of lone wolf approach to this archive maybe highlighting WIlma more could be useful too. This juxtaposed with a photo from Wilma’s perspective could be interesting too. Not sure what it would look like, but it would be interesting to see her perspective of the documents.
For the contributor, I think the toxicity is in the lack of infrastructure around this type of very important archiving. For me, I actually see some of the toxicity in the wild goose chase that seems to be these documents. The toxicity could also be in the disjointedness of the documents and findings themselves. Also, would be interested in getting Wilma’s story? Is there a form of gender toxicity here too? How did she become a one woman show? That history also seems toxic.
I think it materializes toxicity in the archive well, as the author intends. Toxicity is made through knowledge and that knowledge must exist in the world in certain forms in order to do the political/scientific/governing work intended of it. Someone must care for, interpret, and archive this toxic knowledge or it will cease to exist. I would love to see the author unpack this idea of toxic archiving more through this image.
