Beautiful Terror: Pesticides All Around Us?

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In some ways, I consider these images photographic art illustrations. I recently saw beautiful drawings done in the 1950s of the ocean floor. They made a body of knowledge visible and this inspired more sophisticated technologies to map the ocean floor. I think of these pesticide images in that way. We still do not have technology to map the migration and settling of pesticides in the environment and the body, but we are curious creatures who thirst to know and that thirst to know is, in my opinion, tied to our instinct for survival.

Q. Can you explain the process you use to create these images?

I apply the fluorescent tracer, which are powders that I often mix with water just as they are applied in the farm worker demonstrations, illuminating subjects either in complete darkness or in ambient light. The tracer dyes are messy to work with, much finer than flour or dust. I wear a mask. I use portable UV lamps and UV goggles, then photograph what I see.

I print these “static photographs,” but this series took an interesting turn in 2003 when I looked for a medium that was not static so I could show the visible and invisible in the same frame. I felt that the medium of photography didn’t sufficiently disturb the notion that the issue was one left in the past. I was looking for a visual immediacy. That led me to making lenticular photographs (a term often confused with holography); these are photographs that animate — you know those novelty postcards where one image turns or morphs into another? I learned to make these much, much larger than postcards; they animate not in the hand, but as a person moves around them on a wall. To see a virtual animation, visit www.laurietumer.com.

Q. What kinds of people come to see your artwork? Do you ever think that you’re preaching to the choir?

I originally made these images for an art audience and continue to do so. I show them in museum and gallery venues. However, over the years the audience has unexpectedly widened as environmentalists, organic farmers, physicians, scientists, eco-fashion advocates and anti-pesticide activists regularly contact me. I am asked to speak about this series and write about it to audiences beyond the art world. Requests come to use certain images as illustrations in books and magazines, and for fund-raising events. Different kinds of people are interested in them. For example, one physician used the images in training rural physicians to help them recognize and understand pesticide poisoning in children. In the past few years, my work has been shown and written about in Chinese art photography magazines. The subject of pesticides was news to the critics and editors I have worked with in China, and using the subject in art is particularly surprising to them — so no choir there!

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