TOXIC IMAGES: VISUAL REPRESENTATION OF INDUSTRIAL POLLUTION AND FRONTLINE COMMUNITIES
In the first chapter I explain how environmental racism, which rests on a perceived right to maim certain populations and habitats over others, is a manifestation of colonial racial capitalism and settler logics of ownership. I underscore the necessity to resist casting an ecosystem as a wasteland and its inhabitants as waste, for these perceptions primes both to serve as pollution sinks. While the chapter initially tends to lands and bodies separately, explaining how each are discursively and materially rendered disposable and exploitable, I ultimately stress how the two are mutually constitutive. How one is framed and understood informs how the other is apprehended and vice versa. Further, not only are the impacts of extractivist and industrial activities felt equally by both, but these endeavours are also deployed to sever the reciprocal relationships between environment and beings. Creating such dissociation is instrumental to the settler colonial regime since it relies on the premise of empty, unused lands to ascertain its rights to and over a territory. Hence, I argue that environmental racism is a strategy of land dispossession and proceed to describe how it has been materializing in Aamjiwnaang. I explain how treaties, land patents and legislative acts were used to rob the First Nation of its homelands and cast it as an appropriate site for industrial activity and pollution.
From there, chapters 2 and 3 examine the discursive, political and material role performed by photographs in the colonial racial capitalist apparatus, moving from a broad assessment to the specificities of the iconography of Aamjiwnaang First Nation. I open the second chapter by outlining how the medium’s indexicality was employed by settler colonial regimes to develop an imperial scopic regime that worked to substantiate their claims that lands were theirs for the taking and frame certain ecosystems as available for maiming by industrial pollution. To illustrate this use of photography and ground it within the Canadian context of this research, I detail how scenes of an abundant wilderness, empty lands, and industrial prowess coalesced to affirm the identity of the budding Canadian nation and settler jurisdiction over the land. I then move on to detail practices of looking and framing that run counter to and are critical of the dominant regime. More specifically, I advocate for three approaches. The first, aligned with the overall ethos of this research, calls for developing an attuned gaze that looks at photographic archives with an eye for what they reveal about the mechanisms of the dominant regime and the resistance to them. The second, which is the basis of this project, insists on the importance of representational justice, understood as the ability of the individuals photographed to determine how they are to be depicted. The third extends this thinking beyond human beings to consider ways of photographing that honour the perspectives of more-than-human entities, including lands. I argue that such practices unleash the haunting potential of images, whereby the lives/lands pictured are recognized as valuable, and thus rupture with the imperial scopic regime’s intention to devalue said lives/lands. With both an understanding of the imperial scopic regime and of the capacities of countervisualities, I end the chapter with a discussion of prevalent visual strategies deployed to document environmental harms. I highlight how each performs equivocally, both substantiating and unsettling the logics of colonial racial capitalism that abets environmental racism.
This framework provides the basis for my visual discourse analysis of the iconography of Aamjiwnaang’s environmental concerns that follows in chapter 3. This work begins with an empirical content analysis of over a hundred images—126 to be exact—that reveals what are the recurrent visual narrative trends used in Canadian news publications when reporting on the First Nation’s exposure to industrial pollution, namely: posed portraits of local advocates and activists, landscape scenes that focus on the proximity between industry and community spaces, and snapshots of protests. Based on this taxonomy, I then conduct an attuned discursive interpretation of a selection of archetypal photographs. Guiding this analysis are the concerns described so far. To determine what values these images communicate, what logics they are beholden to and what ways of being they support and, I center the notion of haunting, asking if and how the photographs make the lives/lands depicted matter. I compare representations that are deeply affective to those that are merely illustrative, arguing that the former are more effective and just. Yet, I reveal how they are exceptions rather than the norm. For the most part, the photographs of Aamjiwnaang emphasize the omnipresence of industry without paying attention to the vitality of the community and the ecosystem it has been preserving. I argue that such discrepancy confirms the view of the area as one marked for petrochemical manufacturing.
This said, given that this research project is concerned with representational justice—with ensuring that those photographed feel seen accurately—my analysis in chapter 3 must be complemented by that of community members who, through a participatory approach to visual discourse analysis, share what they feel are representative depictions of their reality and concerns. This work is the focus of chapters 4 and 5. In the summer of 2023, I held three workshops. The first was an elaborated images exercise during which participants intervened on a selection of photographs of their community published in Canadian news outlets. They were asked to consider what they appreciated about each picture, what they didn’t and what was missing. The second session was dedicated to envisioning a dissemination strategy through designing knowledge mobilization materials, while the third was a community peer review, intent on validating the findings. Chapter 4 details these different participatory methodologies, describing the principles that guided my collaboration with Aamjiwnaang First Nation, the rationale for each activity, how they unfolded in practice and the methodological lessons they yielded. Overall, it makes the case for developing and implementing participatory approaches to visual discourse analysis as means to advance representational justice. Chapter 5 continues in the same vein, outlining what representational justice looks like according to the Aamjiwnaang community members who participated in the workshops. They stressed the importance of three depictions. First, they were adamant that news publications should not shy away from showing the real, multifaceted impacts of industrial pollution by picturing spills, releases and their consequences on the physical, mental and spiritual health of all living beings. Second, they expressed their wish to see nature feature more prominently, both because petrochemical manufacturing affects the entire ecosystem and kinship relations, and because affirming the beauty and vitality of the territory affirms why it is worth protecting. Finally, participants called for images that would depict and honour their Anishinabek way of life since they felt this would help the public understand the value of their history, traditions, ancestors, and ways of showing up for the Land and for one another.
As I moved through this research, the notion of attunment grew in significance, providing a framing for how I engaged with Aamjiwnaang First Nation and how I analysed the photographs of the community that have been published in local and national news publications. For instance, I turned to the insights of studies scholar Dylan Robinson (2020) who calls on researchers to move away from extractive research based on a practice of “hungry listening” (see chapter 4). I also heeded visual studies scholar Tina Campt’s (2017) recommendation to “listen to images” as a way to perceive the cultural, political and material role they play (see chapter 3). I ultimately return to the multifaceted notion of attunment in the conclusion, offering reflections on developing attuned research methodologies. Similarly, in the concluding pages, I explain how the concept of representational justice, introduced by visual studies scholar Sarah Lewis (2019), proved pivotal as a way to articulate the aspirations of this research, both in its methods—centering community voices—and in its objective—rethinking the visual media coverage of a community at the frontlines of industrial pollution, Aamjiwnaang First Nation, in ways that align with the desires of its residents and honour their lives and lands.