Routine Exposures: Reimaging the Visual Politics of Hazardous Sites

Abstract

This paper aims to photographically reimagine the representation of hazardous sites. It examines disregarded worlds of mundane yet politically vital photography: procedural representations made and circulated in hazardous site interventions. Scholarship which examines the visualisations of hazardous sites remains largely concerned with professional photography and sublime aesthetic registers. This photo essay departs from this epistemological habit and examines the visualities and materialities of technical representations enacted in remediation and research processes. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research which follows the disposal of a chemical stockpile in Tanzania over three decades, the paper approaches photographs through the practices in which they are made and circulated. It occupies more-than-representational register that works to de-sensationalise hazardous site photography. These “routine exposures” unsettle naturalised ways of seeing contamination; they demonstrate how hazardous sites are made (in)visible and enable more situated understandings of the power of photography

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