Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2005/ ... index.html#

Do You See What I See?
Photographer Laurie Tümer shows the hidden paths of pesticides
By Karin Kloosterman
01 Dec 2005

In a segment this fall, Good Morning America simulated pesticide exposure in a New York City classroom. Using a powder visible only under black light, the program showed how far chemicals could spread through an activity as simple as child's play.

The eye-opening exercise wasn't news to Laurie Tümer. The photographer has been making images that expose the presence of synthetic pesticides since 1998, when she suffered near-fatal poisoning after her New Mexico home was sprayed. While recovering, Tümer discovered a muse in the work of Richard Fenske, an environmental scientist at the University of Washington. Fenske uses fluorescent tracer dyes and ultraviolet light to demonstrate how pesticides can spread to agricultural workers' skin, even when protective gear is worn.

By spraying tracers on her shoes and walking through her garden, or superimposing dyes onto landscape-scale canvases, Tümer uses a similar technique to illustrate how and where pesticides travel. The result of her work, a growing collection she calls "Glowing Evidence," is at once startling and stunning -- she compares the patterns in it to constellations. Critics who've seen her images exhibited in Santa Fe have called them eerie, compelling, ingenious, and haunting.

Bedroom, 2005. Tümer makes many tracer images in her home and garden, in an attempt to show what things looked like after her property was sprayed, and how these pesticides persist. Few people realize they take pesticides to bed, she says: "This is an intimate relationship."

Tümer's 25-year photographic career, including a current collaboration with a blind poet, has focused on "seeing the invisible," and was featured in a 2003 documentary of that name. But as work like hers becomes more visible, she says so-called political art is really nothing new. In fact, she traces her work to cave drawings. Like that ancient art form, Tümer says, her photographs are a forum for processing information, conveying dismay, and warning others.

Link to gallery of Tümer's photographs.
http://www.grist.org/gallery/pesticide/farmworker.html


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Karin Kloosterman, a freelance journalist and former entomologist from Canada, is currently based in Tel Aviv as a writer for Israel's Jerusalem Post. She has also contributed to Canada's National Post and National Geographic, and can write on topics from bugs to Bedouins.

Here's another photo if Laurie's from the Grist collection: photo:


Studies in Red, 2005.

This piece, part of a suite titled "Studies in Red, White, and Blue" that was exhibited in Santa Fe last July 4, is intended to provide evidence that absolutely everything Americans value -- from the blood in their bodies to the red chiles prized in Tümer's home state of New Mexico -- is affected by industrial agriculture.

and then this one from the Santa Fe Gallery Link:
http://www.photoeye.com/Gallery/forms/i ... ry=1&Page=



Glowing Evidence: Farmworker Profile


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Scary ... beautifully scary

Critics who've seen her images exhibited in Santa Fe have called them eerie, compelling, ingenious, and haunting.
But as work like hers becomes more visible, she says so-called political art is really nothing new.

So called political art is new to me. I been thinking about political art as “state art” This is all new to me and it is terribly beautiful.

Tümer says, her photographs are a forum for processing information, conveying dismay, and warning others

.

Speaking of dismay, that farm worker’s face, I am thinking about where I am on the food chain. How much do bottom feeders like me add to the problem. Yes I have met the enemy and he is me.

I have not checked out the link yet. This is the best case of the eye witness news blues I have seen lately. Taking man out of nature, our all too rational minds.