Beautiful Terror: Pesticides All Around Us?

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I didn’t necessarily set out to educate others. I was trying to grasp information, and my impulse was that I needed to visualize this information. I also began to wonder: might one reason that Carson was not fully heeded be that the invisible has not been visualized as poignantly as it has been written about?

Q. Tell me about your pesticide exposure artwork. What are the images meant to convey?

The images are meant to visualize what is invisible. I found a muse in the environmental scientist Richard Fenske, borrowing a training technique he developed that provides surprising pictures to farm workers who use pesticides, revealing their exposure in spite of wearing protective gear. This technique, used worldwide, helps workers understand how pesticides travel and persist on their skin and clothing. The demonstration is an effective tool to motivate them to adhere to rigorous clean-up procedures when they return home after working with pesticides.

The technique uses fluorescent tracer dyes and UV light and produces pictures that appear as constellations charting the chemical’s movement and settling, all becoming a dazzling theatrical spectacle under this UV light. As an art photographer, I saw an ‘art aura’ in Dr. Fenske’s images. Also, for me they poignantly expressed in visual terms a personal and collective narrative about our environmental predicament.

With support from Dr. Fenske and his colleagues, I learned to apply this technique closer to home, where the same chemicals used in agriculture are regularly used in stores and schools, where they are brought home on our food and shoes and in the fibers of our clothes. I wanted to see them on the exteriors of our homes, in our blood, and in the interiors of our fat cells, to more fully understand their serious health and environmental consequences and express my own response to all this madness.

Q. How accurately does your work depict what happens with real pesticides?

These dyes are whitening agents used in everything from laundry detergents to shoelaces and toilet papers. These same whitening agents are used in other science-based studies and training demonstrations to help visualize the movement of chemicals. For example, they are used to track bird migrations and in demonstrations to show those who work with electronics how easy it is to contaminate the parts they assemble.

What we’re seeing in the images, whether the dyes are mixed with pesticides or water, are the dyes, not the pesticides. However, it is a fairly accurate depiction. Theoretically if we could see the pesticides, this is what they would look like. Pesticides are colorless substances in so-called inert ingredients, not only to encapsulate them, but also to intensify their effect. These inert ingredients (often called “trade secrets” by manufacturers to avoid divulging what they are), in many cases are more toxic than the pesticides themselves, as they form a kind of chemical stew with the pesticides.

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