Evan Hepler-Smith: FOUND IMAGE: “IN PICTURES: GAZA WATER CRISIS WORSENS.”

I read this image as a collection of toxic relations made visible through the presence of the debris in the foreground.Block the lower half of the image: two boys stand on some indeterminate small-scale structure, modest waves crashing beneath them, looking out past a flock of gulls to an endless sea. Thus framed, the image is historically and socially difficult to situate. There is life (the gulls), desire (the kids), freedom (the sea). This half-image suggests escape, perhaps -- not escape from somewhere in particular, but from a generalized nowhere/anywhere.Bring the bottom half of the picture back into the frame, and the entire image shifts and resolves in relation to the debris in the foreground. We have seen this before -- the visible debris marks the presence of water insecurity and exposure to water-borne toxic chemicals and pathogens, invisible but inferred, and confirmed by the caption of the original photograph. The sea becomes a pollution sink, the gulls further signs of this pollution, the children exposed subjects. The built structure, indeterminate when the bottom half of the image is obscured, becomes the walls and trench of wastewater outflow infrastructure. This infrastructure, as framed in this image, manages to protect nobody and pollute everything at once: land and sea and children and gulls. As Rana Sharif points out in her design statement, the trash in the foreground roots an otherwise indefinite and benign image in a socially and geographically specific toxic location.