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This visualization and caption advance ethnographic insight by providing a positional reflection on the process of apprehending places which are marked by toxicity in explicity ways. The caption describes the ethnographic challenge of witnessing the aesthetic impact of when the geology crumbles under the erosion of acid rain from the smelting industry, revealing bold new colors, while at the same time problematizing the practice of toxic tourism.

The caption can be elaborated to include a bit more information about the ways in which the smelting industry in La Oroya has been described in discourses which engage with toxic aesthetics voyeuristically. How does tourism describe the town, and conversely, what language is used by articles which critique the local industry describe the residues visible in the surrounding landscape?

This is an image of the smelting village of La Oroya taken from above on a guided hike through the mountains. Its composition is notable as it reveals the surrounding landscape’s lighter colored geologies in contrast to the darker colours of the town, and where  industry has left residue on the surrounding hill walls.

This image is already incredibly striking, however if there is room to extend the image’s crop slightly to include a little more of the surrounding landscape, it could add even more impact to the view of the town.

The visualization and caption say that the visibility of toxic residue can complicate concepts of toxicity, as well as the significance of toxic presence for surrounding life and livlihoods. The material composition of toxic traces can be subsumed by other forms of economization of its aesthetics, such as toxic tourism, or converesly, using the same aesthetic shock to disparage the town.

It conveys the complexity of how toxic landscapes emerge historically and are contested or not by locals and nonlocals. It shows a local activist looking over a city that has been affected by industrial toxicity. The awesome landscape conveys a sense of how this place was once non-toxic, invoking a sense of temporality, as if the activist is looking back and forward through time as the place is affected by toxicity.

The caption is brilliant already, covering many different ethnographic aspects of the case study in question.

Taken by author.The gaze of the activist is extremely intriguing and the composition is great, allowing us to see the 'natural' landscape as well as the industry beneath. This gives the aesthetic multiple scales.

No, it's great.

The image says something about the spatialities and temporalities of toxics. Here, from a seemingly peaceful and eerily beautiful viewpoint, the future and past of this landscape is invoked. The caption notes how toxics are contested between a number of different actors, and the complexity of this contestation is evoked in the way the activist looks down onto a messy industrial centre.