Photography and Environmental Activism

Visualising the Struggle Against Industrial Pollution

Conohar Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000182392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Photography

This publication maps out key moments in the history of environmentalist photography, while also examining contemporary examples of artistic practice.

Historically, photography has acted as a technology for documenting the industrial transformation of the world around us; usually to benefit the interests of capitalist markets. An alternative photographic tradition exists, however, in which the indexical image is used 'evidentially' to protest against incidents of industrial pollution. By providing a definition of environmental activism in photographic praxis, and identifying influential practitioners, this publication demonstrates that photography plays a vital role in the struggle against environmental despoliation.

This book will be of interest to scholars in photography, art and visual culture, environmental humanities, and the history of photography.

Part I Photography and the Politics of Pollution

1 Toxic Foam and the Valorisation of Capital

DOI: 10.4324/9781003086314-3

Gisela Parak's monograph Photographs of Environmental Phenomena: Scientific Images in the Wake of Environmental Awareness, USA 1860s–1970s locates the origins of photography as a form of environmental activism in the USA to the months which preceded the election of Richard Nixon as the 37th President. Describing a shift in the political intentionality of photographers in this period, Parak states:

Illustrated articles published by Life from August 1968 to June 1969 helped to mediate and create environmental consciousness as did a special issue of National Geographic, devoting 42 pages to the topic of environmental pollution that coincided with the foundation of the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] in December 1970 (2015: 146).

One such feature was a 14-page photo-essay by Alfred Eisenstaedt entitled: ‘Blighted Great Lakes: Shocking Case of Our Inland Seas Dying from Man-Made Filth’. Published on 23 August 1968, the photo-essay concerned an accumulation of toxic foam on the waters of the Great Lakes that had formed due to the presence of toxic effluents, which had been whipped into a white froth by the force of the wind and waves.

During her discussion of Eisenstaedt's photo-essay, Parak credits the photographer for his capacity to ‘almost sculpturally’ (ibid.: 143) denote his subject matter of toxic foam. Describing Eisenstaedt's image using the simile of dirty soapsuds, the critic describes how the foam was observed by the photographer as an amorphous mass, standing some 15-inches high, and bound for Lake Erie (see Figure 1.1). In her appraisal of Eisenstaedt's photograph, Parak declares the image ‘sensational’, and she compares the depiction of the ‘snow-white foam clouds’ to ‘miniature icebergs’ (ibid.: 142), which stand incongruously in front of the green hues of foliage located in the backdrop of the composition. In Eisenstaedt's photographs of toxic foam on the Great Lakes, Parak detects a shift in how photography was utilised to document incidents of industrial pollution. With the publication of environmentally concerned articles in magazines such as LIFE and National Geographic, she argues that photography transcended its scientific and descriptive origins. As an alternative, photojournalists such as Eisenstaedt sought to develop a range of complex aesthetic techniques, which were designed to connote ‘a moment of suspense, when the threat that a given disaster posed could be experienced’ (ibid.) by the magazine's considerable audience. As Parak makes clear, from the very outset this new mode of photography can be understood as an attempt to engage the audience in a form of environmental activism, which is mediated through an encounter with the indexical image.

Figure 1.1 Alfred Eisenstaedt, ‘Masses of dirty soapsuds glided down Ohio's Cuyahoga River. Shimmering in sewage, they were bound for Lake Erie’, courtesy of LIFE magazine, 23 August 1968. Courtesy of LIFE/Shutterstock.

Eisenstaedt's photographs of toxic foam floating on the banks of Ohio's Cuyahoga River also provide a starting point for analysing the widespread phenomena of toxic foam, which occurs today in the waterways of developing countries, particularly in South Asia. While it may seem odd that a community would choose to contaminate its most precious freshwater reserves, such an outcome is entirely predictable if industrial pollution can be considered as a (by)product of capitalist production, not dissimilar to the way that capitalism produces other commodity forms. If this is indeed the case, the spectre of toxic foam in rivers around the world can be understood as a simile for a model of social organisation which prioritises profits over the need to create sustainable solutions for the production, disposal, and recycling of industrial wastes.

In the essay Marx's Refusal of the Labour Theory of Value (2018), the British-born Marxist geographer David Harvey¹ makes a number of observations pertaining to Marx's notion of the labour theory of value, as it is set forth in the first volume of Capital. Harvey's analysis is accompanied by a diagram (see Figure 1.2), which illustrates how capital is recycled in the consumer economy. Looking at the illustration, the circulation of capital can be understood as a continuous process in which money as a representation of value is used to purchase commodities such as labour power, raw materials, and the means of production, e.g., machinery, energy, rent, etc. The capitalist cycle relies on the fundamental notion that the value of the commodities produced at the end of the production process (i.e., the ‘Realization of Value in Money Form’) is greater than the value of the commodities absorbed during the production process (i.e., the ‘Production of Commodities of Value and Surplus Value Valorization’). This increase in value is eventually captured as a surplus value in the form of money, or it is reinvested in the capital cycle. As Harvey makes clear, the production of value depends on having a population of consumers who can afford to purchase commodities. At the same time, competition between capitalists requires that the cost of production must be continuously lowered. Typically, cost savings can be found through technological innovations or the expansion of markets into new geographical areas.

Figure 1.2 David Harvey, The Capital Cycle, 2018.

One obvious method of reducing the costs associated with production is to outsource manufacturing to economies in which the cost of living is significantly lower than that of developed Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations. Harvey further describes the expansion of globalised production, which occurred from the 1960s onwards, due to some key technological developments such as the invention of shipping containers and the launch of commercial jet-powered aviation (Harvey 2014: 138). Technological advances of this kind allowed Western capitalists the opportunity to circumvent dependencies on localised production due to the prohibitive costs and logistical difficulties associated with international transportation. Moreover, the outsourcing of industrial production from the developed OECD nations to developing economies such as India or Bangladesh is dependent on the implementation of trade deals, which are negotiated between nation States. For wealthy Western countries, the incentive to outsource production is based on the potential savings that can be made when taking into consideration the manufacturing costs of raw materials and labour power. For developing nations, the benefits of such a partnership can include the creation of jobs and the construction of infrastructure in the form of factories or transportation networks.

While a developing economy benefits from external investment and employment opportunities, countries rich in capital such as the USA have a lot more to gain from the arrangement. Goods produced cheaply in poorer nations realise their potential value as commodities when they are sold on the market for a premium. Sales in products such as pharmaceuticals, which have relatively low production costs (even if research and development costs remain high), can generate surplus value for companies in developed nations. However, these profits are not shared with the company's trading partners. On this point, Harvey notes that even when international trade agreements are of mutual benefit, inequalities nevertheless persist to the advantage of wealthier nations:

In the event of exchange between different regional value regimes the social labour in one region may end up subsidising and supporting the economy and lifestyle of another. High value producing regimes, such as those based on labour-intensive production (e.g., Mexico or Bangladesh), may be supporting high productivity capital-intensive regimes (e.g., the United States)

(Harvey 2017: 156).

What is more, by relocating to less affluent destinations, globally capital-intensive regimes dodge the costs associated with the safe disposal of toxic wastes leftover from the manufacturing process. Lacking the critical infrastructure to store and recycle wastes effectively and being deprived of a share in the surplus value of the commodities produced, the burden of industrial pollution is borne by the developing economy. Viewed from this standpoint, globalised industrial production is purposeful in failing to consider the costs associated with the production and disposal of waste in labour-intensive localities.

In 2019, the Italian photographer Giulio Di Sturco published Ganga Ma, a project which represented a decade-long engagement with the Ganges River.² Di Sturco's photo-essay charts the flow of the Ganges River for some 2,500 miles from its source in the Indian Himalayas to the river's culmination in the Bay of Bengal. Writing in an essay accompanying the monograph, the critic Eimear Martin describes the process that Di Sturco employs at the point of making his photographs:

Shot primarily in the morning and evening when light is at its softest, the images in Ganga Ma are suffused with a warm sand-colour, conveying the impression of parched land. Throughout the photographic process there is no attempt to privilege either foreground or background, allowing light and tone to wash over the images without hierarchy. In this way, Di Sturco places subject and landscape on equal footing: a formal manifestation of an environmental worldview (2019).

One of Di Sturco's untitled photographs (see Figure 1.3) depicts a lone individual attempting to dissipate an incoming tide of toxic foam with the paltry aid of a hosepipe. Not unlike Eisenstaedt's photographs of foam some 60 years earlier, Di Sturco's portrait hints at a moment of suspense, in which this lone individual is observed moments before he is consumed by the great mass of frothy foam.

Figure 1.3 Giulio di Sturco, ‘a worker with a water hose tries to tame an iceberg of foam from chemical waste dumped by factories along the Yamuna River’, 2019.

Toxic foam is an incongruous pollutant. The fluffy opalescence of the spume is more often associated with foam parties in nightclubs or the luxuriousness of a bubble bath; it is not so readily associated with an environmental disaster. In Di Sturco's photograph, the spectre of this milky lather descending upon the figure with a hosepipe in hand lends a surreal quality to the image. The pastoral peachy hues in Di Sturco's composition are beguiling because they imbue the photograph with a sense of warmth and optimism, which is even more impactful as the chemical constitution of the toxic foam is finally discerned by the audience. Upon grasping the toxicity of the scene, the sandal-clad man in Di Stuco's photograph seems vulnerable, and his attempts to hold back the looming spectre of foam with the small trickle of water that emanates from his hosepipe appear miserably inadequate.

The ecological problem of toxic foam pollution in India is widespread. It affects not only the Ganges but also other major water channels such as the Yamuna River, which is a tributary of the Ganges, and the location for Di Sturco's photograph. In an article for Newsweek, Cameron Conaway reports ‘millions of gallons of industrial effluents and raw sewage drain into the Ganges each day’ with the result that, ‘Diarrhea, often caused by exposure to fecal matter, kills 600,000 Indians per year’ (2015). Scientific studies of the Yamuna River, a water channel notorious for the presence of toxic foam, suggest that the groundwater has been contaminated by raw sewage, heavy metals, pesticides, and detergents. One worrying result of this contamination is that bacteria in the river have been detected which are resistant to antibiotics (Siddiqui et al. 2019). An additional study on the presence of pharmaceutically active compounds (phACs) in the water channel has detected high levels of painkillers, i.e., ibuprofen, codeine, aspirin, etc., which point towards contamination from the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals in the region, not to mention the culminative effect of raw sewage accumulation emanating from nearby Delhi (Mutiyar et al. 2018). Given that the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers hold a spiritual significance for most Indians, the chronic pollution of the water channel indicates a profoundly ambivalent relationship to the river, which is regarded as the sacred mother of India while simultaneously functioning as a dumping ground for both industrial and human wastes.

Returning once again to Harvey's diagram of ‘The Capital Cycle’ (see Figure 1.2), it is interesting to note that raw materials such as oil, wood, metals, forms of food such as cereals or fruit, and other living creatures such as fish, all come under the label of the ‘Free Gifts of Nature'. As capital needs to continuously expand in order to produce new streams of surplus value, the burden on natural resources exponentially increases along with it. Not only does this lead to resource depletion, but it is also associated with the production of industrial pollution and the poisoning of the biosphere. In Harvey's diagram, this tension is illustrated by the reciprocity that exists between the ‘Production, Reproduction, and Destruction of Space, Place, and Nature’, and its correlative on the opposite side of the diagram: ‘Production, Reproduction, and Destruction of Human Nature and Culture’. For Harvey, the message is clear – capitalism's need to perpetually expand its markets should be considered an expression of the same destructive behaviours in the capital cycle, which also cause the wrecking of ecosystems. For this reason, the exploitation of the proletariat and the reinforcement of social inequalities such as racism, sexism, and sectarianism, in culture cannot be wholly separated from the destruction of the flora and fauna in the biosphere. All suffer in the pursuit of surplus value.

The insubstantial nature of the toxic foam in Eisenstaedt's and Di Sturco's photographs is symbolic of the transformation of surplus value from its origin as raw materials in the form of labour power and commodities into ‘Value in Motion’, i.e., money. When the valorisation of capital (Verwertung) occurs during the production process, value takes on metaphysical qualities by becoming elusive and insubstantial – surplus value translates into an abstract figure on the balance sheet of a bank account. Some of this surplus value is retained by the capitalist as profit, while the remainder is reinvested to purchase raw materials as the capital cycle begins once again. For this reason, Harvey likens the capital cycle to the hydrological weather cycle, in which water undergoes the continuous process of evaporation from the sea, condensation into clouds, precipitation into rain, before falling back into the sea once more (2017: 2). In the examples of Eisenstaedt's and Di Sturco's photographs, the phenomenon of toxic foam in water channels can be understood as a metaphor for the valorisation of capital (Verwertung), which occurs when money as ‘Value in motion' acquires metaphysical qualities and evaporates from the site of production.

Marx began the process of writing the first volume of Capital in 1863, some 20 years after Edwin Chadwick published Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain [1842], which outlined in great scientific detail the correlation between poor sanitation in cities and outbreaks of disease, most notably cholera and typhoid. Marx would also have experienced th...