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This image complicates how we view contamination and toxicity. By “ridding” the land of one contaminant, a toxic deforestation occurs, changing the environmental landscape. The photo almost plays a visual mindtrick. I’m used to seeing these photos in environmental magazines where the barren land represents the logging industry or palm oil industry and can quickly see that the barren = bad, but the equation is not so easy here.

This image conveys the various toxicities involved in what one might assume to be a particularly neutral or nontoxic process--the process of demining. The areas lush and green are, in fact, the still contaminated areas with landmines, while the clear barren land is cleared of those contaminants. This photo complicates the way contamination is imagined in this particular area and process of demining.  

I was wondering if this image was part of clearing for plantation, but after reading the caption it really connects what one sees with an idea of vulnerability and damage. 

This is very interesting, it makes one wonder about those few plants growing, does the burning works? Do people use this land afterward? 

This image is created by the ethnographer and really shows her proximity to a risky fieldsite. 

The image is quite compelling as it is. 

It says a lot about devastation and damage, which I understand is linked with the idea of toxicity, although that is not explicit here. 

I think this photo essay does a great job of raising important questions concerning the dialectics of "seemingly virtuous principles" such as peace. It hints at the irreducibility of the multiple meanings of what constitutes peace and how peace is understood at the local, national, and international scales while highlighting the tensions and contradictions in their intersecting definitions.

I would invite you to explore this notion of "the dialectics of 'peace' and 'toxicity' in post-conflict Columbia"

The images are a combination of produced mappings and fieldwork photography taken by the ethnographer. I very much like this approach but there seems to be a scalar disconnect between the country scale maps and the two photographed landscapes. Perhaps linking the photos to the map could help visually contextualize the narrative and maybe a medium level scale (county or jurisdictional territorial scale) might help serve that connection.