Toxic Portraits: Resisting Multiple Invisibilities in the Environmental Justice Movement

This essay conceptualizes "toxic portraits," close-up, in situ photographs of people in toxically assaulted places. Toxic portraits articulate the multiple invisibilities attending environmental injustice through a series of visible indexical signs. As a result, toxic portraits enable spec...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Quarterly journal of speech 2015-04, Vol.101 (2), p.405-425
Main Author: Barnett, Joshua Trey
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Environmental Justice
Ethics
Pollution
Portraits
Rhetoric
Subjunctive
Toxicology
Visual Rhetoric
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Summary:This essay conceptualizes "toxic portraits," close-up, in situ photographs of people in toxically assaulted places. Toxic portraits articulate the multiple invisibilities attending environmental injustice through a series of visible indexical signs. As a result, toxic portraits enable spectators to see the precariousness of life as dramatized in human relationships to the environments in which we live. Drawing on the "subjunctive voice of the visual" as a rhetorical heuristic, I conceptualize the productive space created by toxic portraits and ultimately argue that these images invite an ethically inflected response to the dangers of living in a polluted world.
ISSN:0033-5630
1479-5779
DOI:10.1080/00335630.2015.1005121