The landscape of petrochemical industries in the backdrop of blue spaces is faded, it almost escapes the sight of the viewer. It would help for the ethnographer to provide an edited version of the image with increased sharpness and curves to highlight industrial backdrop.
Assuming it is created by the ethnographer, it is landscape image from the field site. The silhoutte nature of the image creates a very powerful focus to the image and perfectly highlights the themes illustrated in the caption.
The caption is elaborate enough and perfectly balances the ethnographic visualization and theorization of the phenomena.
The visualization captures the prolonged interactions between human and more-than-human entities and how they have transformed over the years. It also directly advances the gendered and indentity politics of toxicities, both spatially and temporally.
This is a nicely composed shot that juxtaposes a sillhouette of a male surfer in the foreground with appears to be a string of industrial facilities in the background across some sort of bay. The caption helpfully ties the various elements of the picture together in a manner that seems organic to the image even as it establishes the ethnographers' main themes. The position of the surfer in the shot reinforces that masculinity is the main subject here, but a kind of masculinity that must be constructed and sustained within a world largely beyond the control of any individual man.
The direct confrontational stare, the petrol-stained face, facial hair...this is the embodiment of masculine Western ideals, physical strength and stalwartness, protectiveness (of what? Family? Property? A 'way of life'?), gate-keeping. The image in combination with the caption conveys a sort of nostalgia for a bygone-and entirely fictional-era in which dangers were clear and physically present, not creeping, insidious, and perhaps invisibly toxic. When heroism was as simple as offering your body in the name of patriotism, whether in combat or in home-front preparedness.
The caption is thorough and eloquently notes what the image evinces. The only question I have regards the men's relationship to the development of wetsuits, but it might not be appropriate to address that extensively within this short caption.
This appears to be a professional photo, and I assume it is created by the ethnographer, though that isn't clear. Its composition is professional, scale of attention to detail is remarkable, aesthetic is polished yet retains a sense of spontanaeity--it appears the subject has just emerged from the water.
I have no suggestions on how to enrich this image to extend its ethnographic import. The image is loaded with information while being beautiful--I can't ask for more.
This visualization addresses the many connotations of toxicity in its relation to masculinity. I'm left with more meaningful questions than concrete answers, which, to me, is a feature of a successful image. How can we visualize and think about masculinity's relationship to landscape, historical and contemporary? What happens when the consequences of an extractive relationship become toxic to the extractor? How does the extractor's reaction relate to dominant ideas of masculinity?
