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Author(s): Jennifer Peeples
Article title: Imaging toxins
Article no: RENC 775172
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Imaging toxins
Jennifer Peeples
This essay examines how toxins are visually represented in news and popular media.
5More specifically, it analyzes the function of visual narratives, identity, place, and
uncertainty in the construction of the controversial toxicant Agent Orange, a defoliant
used by the US military during the Vietnam War to reduce jungle cover and destroy
cropland causing devastating health and environmental effects. Toxins present an
interesting challenge for visual construction in that they are often invisible and banal in
10 their esthetics. The essay concludes with five observations for understanding the relation-
ship between images and toxins.
Keywords: Images; Risk; Toxins; Visual narrative; Agent Orange; Rhetoric
In Rachel Carson’s (1962) influential ‘‘Fable for Tomorrow,’’ she described a town
15 stricken by a mysterious malady, one that withers crops, kills animals, and sickens
humans. She shocked her readers when she explained that the devastation she
described was real; it had just not all happened in one place. Carson, who had been
arguing for greater control of pesticides, would have been dismayed to find out that
in a few short years, her fable had become a disturbing reality. The defoliants sprayed
20 on the jungles and cropland of Vietnam would cause widespread deforestation, water
contamination, poisoning of farmland, animal suffering and death, degradation
of human health, and fetal deformity. Waugh (2010b) calls the choice to blanket
Vietnam with Agent Orange ‘‘the first declared war on the environment,’’ and
‘‘the world’s first planned ecocide, in which entire ecosystems were targeted and
25 destroyed’’ (p. 118).
While it is now generally accepted that Agent Orange has had an ongoing,
devastating effect on human and environmental health, this has not always been the
case. Constructing chemical impact, especially visually, is challenging. Toxins often
do not look toxic.
1
The clear, innocuous-looking Agent Orange belied its lethality.
30 The physical consequences of exposure to toxins, such as cancer, may not be visible
Jennifer Peeples is an Associate Professor at Utah State University. Correspondence to: Jennifer Peeples,
Department of Languages, Philosophy and Communication Studies, Utah State University, 0720 Old Main Hill,
Logan, UT 84322-0720, USA. Email: jennifer.peeples@usu.edu
#2013 Taylor & Francis
Environmental Communication, 2013
Vol. 00, No. 00, 120, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2013.775172
{RENC}articles/RENC775172/RENC_A_775172_O.3d[x] 18-02-2013 19:9:47 CE: A.C
and the contaminants can exist in the soil, water, or air for years, making it difficult
to capture the relationship between toxin and effect. In addition, the uncertainty
embedded in arguments over toxins, demonstrated by the difficulty of ascertaining
whether this particular pollutant is responsible for this particular illness, further defies
35 visual representation. And yet we live surrounded by contaminants (Environmental
Protection Agency, 2009) in cultures where meaning is most often constructed
visually, making it imperative to understand how images function in the representa-
tion of toxins (Peeples, 2011).
With that purpose in mind, this essay provides an analysis of the photographs used
40 in mainstream popular media to create the meaning for the dioxin-laden defoliant
Agent Orange. In it, I introduce visual narratives,
2
describe Agent Orange’s use in
Vietnam, and discuss the roles of identity and place in the visual representation of
toxins. After comparing the visual narrative to the discursive ones that surround
and interact with the images, I explore the national and cultural ramifications of
45 the visual representation of Agent Orange and conclude with an explanation of the
construction and function of toxic images.
Over eleven million gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed from 1965 to 1970,
covering 10% of South Vietnam’s jungles, transportation routes, and cultivated areas
in an attempt by the US military to deprive the Vietnamese enemy of jungle cover
50 and food. While Agent Orange is the most recognized herbicide, its use only
encompassed about 60% of all the defoliants sprayed in Vietnam by the US military
(Shuck, 1987). In addition to its health and environmental impacts, ‘‘the herbicide
and its notorious contaminant [dioxin] is as responsible for changing the percep-
tion of chemicals in the U.S. as the explosion in Bhopal, India, in 1984 and the
55 leaking waste dump at Love Canal, N.Y. in 1978’’ (Hanson, 2008, p. 40).
3
With its
continued use as yardstick for establishing toxicity (for example, see Clarke, 2000;
Tyson, 1991), its presence in the American imagination (books, products, fonts, and
rock bands have all been named ‘‘Agent Orange’’), and, most importantly, its
introduction of ‘‘dioxin’’ to the public lexicon (Hanson, 2008), an analysis of Agent
60 Orange is key to understanding American’s perception of toxins and risk. In addition,
the importance of examining the photographs of Agent Orange cannot be overstated.
According to Kennedy (2008
AQ1 ), the images from the Vietnam War era clearly show
‘‘an American way of seeing, that is, a way of seeing the world that is visually codified
and thematized by the national concerns of the United States.’’ He contends, the
65 ‘‘visual legacies of the Vietnam War...[are] still being played out within American
popular culture’’ (p. 281).
This project also answers a number of calls for research. In her examination of the
contrasting frames used by English and Arabic media coverage of the Afghan War,
Fahmy (2010) notes, ‘‘little of the work examining the framing of news events has
70 focused on visual images’’ (p. 697). Looking specifically at environmental commu-
nication research, Hansen and Machin (2008) maintain that while much has been
written on the ways environmental texts shape public perception, the role of
images has been neglected. Furthermore, they argue, ‘‘[i]f we wish to understand the
discourses presented in the media that might shape public perceptions of the
2J. Peeples
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75 environment and green issues we must also understand how these discourses are
realized visually’’ (Hansen & Machin, 2008, p. 777). Peeples (2011) notes that even less
research has examined the visual construction of toxins. Finally, this project extends
Seager (1993) and Waugh’s (2010b) analyses of war, gender, and the environment.
To gather images of Agent Orange, I searched Lexis/Nexis, SIRS Knowledge Source,
80 EPSCO Host, The Historical Newspapers file for the New York Times, and Google
Images for any photographs dealing with Agent Orange from 1979 to 2008.
I narrowed down the hundreds of articles by focusing on those in which Agent
Orange was the primary topic and ones that had a strong visual presence to the
piece.
4
I compiled 69 articles containing 184 toxic images. I define toxic images as
85 visual representations that are found in print or digital media of people, places, or toxins,
which are used to make claims of human-produced contamination causing the
degradation of the natural (the body or environment). The sources include major
newspapers, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, popular magazines
such as Life and Vanity Fair, as well as news and scientific magazines like Newsweek
90 and Science. After organizing the images chronologically, I examined each photo-
graph by noting its content (who and what is pictured, where, and when) and its
formal qualities (frame, distance, angle, light, etc.). With primary emphasis on the
images, I then reread each article comparing the written and the visual depictions of
Agent Orange. As this is a rhetorical analysis, as opposed to a social scientific survey,
95 the intent is not to make definitive statements about the frequency or dispersal of
images, but to provide insights into the function of photographs as they construct
a public understanding of environmental contamination.
A number of award-winning photographs are included in this analysis. The awards
speak both to the proficiency of the photographers and the cultural impact of
100 the images. Pictures of the Year International (POYI; 2012) chose four of the
photojournalists to have their photographs reproduced. According to the organiza-
tions website, POYI’s mission is ‘‘to empower the world’s best documentary photo-
graphy, to provide a visual portrayal of society, and to foster an understanding of the
issues facing our civilization’’ (http://archive.poyi.org/about). In addition, in 2008,
105 David Guttenfelder was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for his Associated Press
photographs of children with Agent Orange’-related abnormalities (http://www.
pulitzer.org/bycat/Feature+Photography). And finally, in 2006, James Nachtwey’s
photographs of Vietnamese victims for Vanity Fair earned him a second place prize
from the News Photographer magazine in the Enterprise Picture Story category and
110 second place in the Best of Photojournalism contest in 2007 (http://bop.nppa.org/
2007/still_photography/winners/OES/79105/152089.html).
In the article accompanying Nachtwey’s Vanity Fair photographs, Christopher
Hitchens (2006) begins by explaining the importance of images for understanding
toxicity and health:
115 To be writing these words is, for me, to undergo the severest test of my core belief
that sentences can be more powerful than pictures. A writer can hope to do what a
photographer cannot: convey how things smelled and sounded as well as how
things looked. I seriously doubt my ability to perform this task on this occasion.
Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 3
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Unless you see the landscape of ecocide, or meet the eyes of its victims, you will
120 quite simply have no idea. I am content, just for once and especially since it is the
work of the brave and tough and undeterrable James Nachtwey to be occupying
the space between pictures. (p. 107)
With deep respect for Hitchens’ moving statement, this analysis and others like it
contend that the written text and visual images do more than simply stand next to
125 one another. In the case of Agent Orange, I found two distinctive visual threads, the
first telling the story of American victims, and later, the Vietnamese. Both showed
identity, place, illness, and suffering. The text surrounding the images composed a
much different story, allowing for a wider cast of characters, including entities that
were not easily represented visually: bureaucracy, science, law, and politics. The
130 written text was also able to articulate the uncertainty that plagues discussions of
environmental and human poisoning due to the difficulty of making a causal
connection between toxins and health. The words and images each constructed
meaning for Agent Orange, told stories that were, at times, complementary and, at
others, contradictory, with both influencing their audiences’ understanding of the
135 impact of Agent Orange on the places and people that are its victims.
Visual narrative
Of the ways to represent something, photographs are often touted as truest to their
source. An image appears to preserve a moment in time, to document or provide
evidence that something existed, or at least that it existed the way it appeared at the
140 instance of photographic capture. Unless the method of production is called into
question, images are often seen as objective, as if they can speak for themselves the
axiom of a thousand words. Because words take longer to process and images have a
more visceral immediacy (Mendelson & Darling-Wolf, 2009), images are particularly
effective at representing loss and emotion (Duffy, 2011), documenting tragedy
145 (Kampf, 2006), visualizing trauma (Duffy, 2011), allowing for vengeance (Bajorek,
2010), picturing war and atrocities (Mendelson & Darling-Wolf, 2009; Parry, 2011),
or bearing witness (Noble, 2010).
But, images do not simply represent reality. As Gilligan and Marley (2010) note,
‘‘Images are...polysemic. Different audience members may pick up on different
150 elements within the same image, or imbue the same element with a different
meaning’’ (sec. 6.1), though the audience is not alone in the process of visual
meaning-making. The construction of the image influences the viewer’s under-
standing of the subject. Beyond the question of what should or should not be
included in the photograph, the framing of the subject can be altered based on
155 whether it is shot from above or below, from a close distance or from afar, in light or
in shadow, or whether the audience is positioned to look straight on or from an
angle. Each adjustment made by the photographer influences the audience’s feeling
of connectivity, of power, or of intimacy with the subject (Kress & van Leeuwen,
2008). Because slight changes can have great impact in audiences’ interpretation
160 (see Sturken & Cartwright’s, 2009 discussion of the effect of differing hues in the
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representations of murder suspect O.J Simpson’s face), a photographer, a journalist or
an editor’s choice of one photograph over another for public consumption is neither
objective nor inconsequential. ‘‘The meaning of an image or of multiple images, or
a sequence of images is negotiated between the producer(s) of the image and the
165 viewer(s) of the image, and this negotiation is mediated though the image itself ’’
(Gilligan & Marley, 2010, sec. 6.1).
Most importantly, for this discussion, the photojournalists’ choices and the
audience’s predilections do not take place in a vacuum. Both are strongly influenced
by the national context in which they are embedded. Photographers construct their
170 images to fit within cultural- and national-specific schema, stereotypes, or narratives
that are easily recognizable to their audience, providing ‘‘ready-made interpretations’’
for their viewers. ‘‘As images are shaped and read through the lens of these cultural
narratives, the subjects of the photographs are positioned in a ‘normalized manner’’’
(Remillard, 2011, p. 130). For example, Kozol (2004), in her analysis of civilian
175 photographs shot during the Kosovo conflict, critiques the simplistic war narrative of
‘‘victims, aggressors and rescuers’’ (p. 5). Along with the subjects of the images,
photographs can also situate their viewers. In the pictures of fleeing refugees, the
audience is frequently positioned as being ‘‘safe,’’ as the refugees are framed moving
away from danger and toward the camera (Parry, 2011).
180 Gilligan and Marley (2010) warn:
while we certainly cannot fix the meaning of an image we send out into the world,
it is surely crucial to be at least aware of how its ‘fixed’ compositional elements are
likely to be understood once it is out there fighting to be heard against its
competitor images and the normative contextual backdrop they provide. (sec. 7.2)
185 Those images that fit within existing narratives or schemas make comprehension and
recollection easier for audiences (Fahmy, 2010, p. 699; Mendelson & Darling-Wolf,
2009). Furthermore, the repetition of similar images tends to embed them in the
national consciousness psychologically, emotionally, and symbolically (Hariman &
Lucaites, 2007). The relationship between image and culture becomes especially
190 apparent during times of national conflict when visual archives ‘‘replenish themselves
by employing familiar motifs in new contexts and new motifs in familiar contexts and
intersecting with national myths’’ (Kampf, 2006, p. 265). For example, the structure
and symbols of the iconic photograph depicting the flag raising at Iwo Jima was used
to establish meaning for the 9/11 tragedy (Hariman & Lucaites, 2007). Fahmy (2010)
195 concludes, ‘‘[A]lthough journalists may follow guidelines for objective reporting,
different cultural and political perspectives do filter into the newsmaking process,
leading to a dominant framing of the news event to the target audience’’ (p. 712). This
tendency to construct images that reify hegemonic narratives becomes even more
influential when dealing with the ambiguity and uncertainty inherent in toxins.
200 Images and toxic risk
With toxins’ tendency toward banality (they don’t look dangerous) and their frequent
invisibility, individuals attend to certain contamination risks not because they are the
Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 5
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most dire, pressing, or dangerous, but because they are the most compellingly
articulated. In addition, the rhetoric surrounding the cases of contamination does
205 not always rely on factual information or scientific evidence. ‘‘[R]isk judgments
are, to some degree, a by-product of social, cultural, and psychological influences’’
(McComas, 2006, p. 76). This is not to say that there isn’t a material reality a
physical truth at the core of every environmental toxin controversy. But ‘‘the
responsibility for the crisis, its magnitude, and its duration’’ are all contestable,
210 creating an exigency requiring discourse that crafts scientific data and community
concerns into a coherent crisis narrative (Millar & Heath, 2004, p. 5). Those
fabricating the narrative make visual and discursive choices that construct meaning
for the public. In doing so, they establish protagonists and antagonists, the nature of
the crisis, its origin and duration, where it takes place (at the factory, in Congress, in
215 the soil, in the body), and what are its effects. Rhetors use these narratives to help
audiences understand the social and political worlds in which they live. They also
‘‘sanction some kinds of actions and not others’’ (Denton, 2004, p. 7). As with
photographers, rhetors may rely on established narrative templates, such as the
tragedy, the comic form, or pastoral betrayal (Buell, 1998), to ‘‘make risk scenarios
220 intelligible to the reader or viewer in a particular way’’ (Heise, 2002, p. 763). As the
risk becomes a public issue, these narratives compete for positions of prominence in
face-to-face decision-making and mediated venues.
Visual narratives are particularly instrumental in crafting a public understanding
of risk. Ferreira (2004), speaking specifically of film, maintains that the ‘‘medium
225 encourages audiences to identify with the human, social, and environmental conflicts
portrayed in the narratives and thus induces vicarious experience of risk events’’
(p. 200). In addition:
[m]uch of people’s knowledge about the world is gathered from the reading of
visual images in television and newsprint media. This is especially so in the case of
230 ‘risk events,’ from epidemics to ecological disasters, creating a heightened awareness
of the fragility of life-systems in face of different kinds of hazards (Ferreira,
Boholm, & Lo¨fstedt, 2001, p. 283)
Simply speaking, risk is constructed most potently through a visual medium, wherein
people come to conclusions about what they know based on what they see. Since
235 most people in the USA will never have a direct encounter with Agent Orange, and
because of the complexity of the science and legality of the toxin, visual representa-
tions become the most influential ways in which people came to understand the
environmental, physical, and national ramifications of spraying Agent Orange in
Vietnam.
240 Agent Orange
Of the many herbicides used in Vietnam, the most notorious was Agent Orange,
named after the band of color found on its barrels. The two goals of ‘‘Operation
Hades,’’ later given the more innocuous title ‘‘Operation Ranch Hand,’’ were to
deprive the North Vietnamese of jungle cover and, later, to destroy the crops of the
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245 villages suspected of aiding the enemy (Shuck, 1987). Starting in 1964, the defoliant
was sprayed from airplanes on which were written, ‘‘Only You Can Prevent a Forest.’’
According to US and Vietnamese military reports, the number of people directly
sprayed was a little over 3000, with 2.1 million to 4.8 million indirectly affected
(Stellman, Stellman, Christian, Weber, & Tomasallo, 2003).
250 As early as 1952, army officials had been informed by Monsanto Chemical
Company, a producer of Agent Orange, that the defoliant was contaminated with a
toxic substance that raised concerns for human health, especially when applied at
high concentrations by inexperienced operators (Shuck, 1987). By the late 1960s, the
source of danger was found to be a contaminant created in the production process
255 (2,3,7,8 tetrachlorodibenso-p-dioxin), which has been described as ‘‘perhaps the most
toxic molecule ever synthesized by man’’ (Shuck, 1987, p. 18).
With growing public concern, the government officially halted the application of
Agent Orange in 1971 (Stellman et al., 2003). The initial debate over the use of
chemical defoliants in Vietnam became a vociferous fight for reparations for soldiers
260 victimized by those choices. In 1984, US veterans were awarded an out-of-court
settlement of 180 million dollars from the chemical companies who produced Agent
Orange, the largest compensation package in US history at that time. At no point,
however, did the chemical companies or the US federal government admit legal
liability. One of the primary reasons no one was forced to claim responsibility is the
265 difficulty of establishing a causal relationship between toxins and human health. With
uncertainty playing a central role in both the trial and the surrounding discursive
narrative, Shuck’s description of the difficultly of creating a definitive link between
Agent Orange and the devastating human effects is particularly telling:
Information on the dioxin levels in the Agent Orange to which American soldiers
270 were exposed was even less reliable. The areas in which aerial spraying missions had
been conducted were known, but it was impossible to know how much of the
herbicide reached the ground where people could ingest or inhale it; the levels to
which specific individuals had been exposed was impossible to learn. [A]lthough
dioxin at certain levels was clearly capable of causing serious diseases, those same
275 diseases could also result from other causes. It followed, then, that inferences
concerning Agent Orange’s causation of particular diseases in particular individuals
would remain weak and speculative. (Shuck, 1987, p. 18)
In 1994, the Veterans Benefits Improvement Act formally established the presump-
tion that twelve diseases are linked to Agent Orange: chloracne, diabetes, peripheral
280 neuropathy, porphyria cutanea tarda, Hodgkin’s disease, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma,
chronic lymphocytic leukemia, soft-tissue sarcoma, respiratory cancers, multiple
myeloma, and prostate cancer (Schensul, 2005). The January 2007 issue of Science
added that there is ‘‘limited or suggestive evidence of an association’’ for spina bifida
in offspring of exposed individuals (Stone, inset), with spina bifida being the only
285 birth defect recognized as a result of Agent Orange exposure.
Claiming many of the same ailments as the US veterans and dealing with the same
uncertainties, Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange have been unsuccessful in their
lawsuits against US chemical companies. That fact that Agent Orange was sprayed
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during war also changed the rules of legal liability. Though horrific in its effects, US
290 federal judge, Jack B. Weinstein declared that the use of Agent Orange was not an act
of chemical warfare. In his decision against a damage suit filed on behalf of millions
of Vietnamese, he wrote, ‘‘The prohibition of [the use of poison] extended only to
gases deployed for their asphyxiation or toxic effects on man, not to herbicides
designed to affect plants that may have unintended harmful side effects on people’’
295 (Glaberson, 2005, p. B6). Goodman, a lawyer for the Vietnamese claimants countered,
‘‘He ruled as a matter of law that what these defendants manufactured was not a
poison, whereas even these manufacturers recognized that it was at the time’’
(Glaberson, 2005, p. B6). During the same period as the legality of Agent Orange
was being repeatedly debated in the courtroom, the meaning of Agent Orange was
300 being constructed for the American people through visual and written narratives found
in US newspapers and magazines.
In the following sections, I describe the two distinct visual narratives that make up
the story of Agent Orange. As explained previously, images are polysemic (Gilligan &
Marley, 2010, sec. 6.1). Different audiences perceive and emphasize different aspects
305 of a photograph, creating variant readings of an image, though they are somewhat
contained within a shared cultural or national context. My reading of this collection
of images emphasizes identity (specifically gender), place, and toxin. I offer that
other valid readings of Agent Orange are possible as the viewer, image, focus, and/or
context changes. Next, I compare my reading of the visual narrative to the discursive
310 narratives found in the article’s text. I then discuss the national and cultural
ramifications of these Agent Orange narratives, and conclude with an explanation of
the construction and function of toxic images.
Bringing Agent Orange home
The first narrative of Agent Orange is an American story. Though spraying took place
315 in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam from 1964 to 1971, there is only one
picture, reproduced twice, of Southeast Asia (Severo, 1979a; Shear, 1979). Equally
surprising, during the same time period, I found no photographs of Vietnamese
people in relation to Agent Orange. While the written narrative locates Vietnam as
the site of contamination, with each soldier’s story beginning with a discussion of
320 being directly sprayed or walking through the dioxin-laden foliage in Vietnam, the
scene for the visual narrative is the USA.
Perhaps less surprising, considering that the vast majority of Americans who were
sprayed with Agent Orange were soldiers, all the photographs, besides two in one
article, show men as protagonists (Dullea, 1981, p. A1). In the images of Americans,
325 the male protagonists are constructed into three categories: victims, fathers, and
soldiers-activists. As with other representations of soldiers at the time, images of
‘‘Vietnam soldiers focus[ed] almost exclusively on the more intimate, individual or
collective of separate voices’’ (Jeffords, 1989, p. 2).
The primary way the men are shown in print media is as victims of the defoliant.
330 The men are pictured with neck braces, crutches, wheelchairs, emaciated bodies, and
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swollen and deformed hands. As a viewer, it is impossible to tell which of the injuries
are from the physical war and which are from the chemical. Victims with invisible
ailments are shown, too, their illnesses made evident through their gaze and
identification with the audience. The victims sit or lean none are photographed in
335 motion. They stare straight out at the viewer with grave faces (for example, Barron,
1980; Severo, 1979b; Taubes, 1988). The description over one of these photographs
explains the complicated nature of the soldiers’ illness:
The Government does not acknowledge that the herbicide known as Agent Orange
harmed anything but plant life in Vietnam, so the two doctors in the herbicide
340 clinic cannot do much more than offer sympathy when war veterans insist that
their rashes, headaches and more serious troubles were caused by the defoliant.
(Barron, 1980, p. A19)
In contrast to the pictures of individuals with visible ailments, who avert their eyes
from the viewer and present their bodies for the audiences’ appraisal, these photo-
345 graphs are ‘‘demand’’ shots in which the subject makes direct eye contact with the
viewers, implicitly asking something of them (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2008). Because
of the uncertainty surrounding toxin-related illnesses, especially at that time, the men
may have been framed as asking the viewer to believe their ailments and suffering
were real, even when science and the government did not recognize their existence
350 or cause. The interaction of image and text raises some of the same tensions of what
is known and what is unknown that can be found in images of toxic landscapes
(Peeples, 2011).
The second way men are constructed in the American visual narrative is as fathers.
Of the eight award-winning pictures in Wendy Watriss’s (1981) photographic essay
355 ‘‘Tracking Agent Orange’’ in Life magazine, three are of fathers holding or touching
their children (http://archive.poyi.org/items/show/10690). This intimate and loving
interaction between fathers and their families is one that is repeated through this
period. In a front page article in the New York Times, an image shows a father in
the backyard with his two children (Severo, 1979b). The scene is a familiar snapshot.
360 Identification with the traditional family photograph is made strange by the
recognition that the father is in pajamas and a robe in his backyard, and he is
unable to help balance his son on his shoulders or place his arm around his daughter
due to the crutches that support him. The fathers in these images are all photo-
graphed in intimate, domestic settings: on the floor with the kids in the family room,
365 sitting in the kitchen, or standing in front of their homes.
Women play a minor role in this visual narrative. When mothers are included,
such as in Watriss’s photograph of the family around the kitchen table, they are off
to the side of the frame not touching or interacting with the children. This
contravention of a traditional family role is even more striking when the viewer
370 recognizes that the children too are victims of Agent Orange. The daughter being
nuzzled by her father does not have an arm, the boy on his father’s lap has a large
facial tumor, and a child being hugged by his father, as we see in subsequent images,
has deformed forearms and hands. The prototype of the nurturing, protective
mother, especially to a sick child, is violated by these images, with fathers in their
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375 place. The text supporting these photographs explains how each man was contami-
nated with Agent Orange, and that it is suspected of causing illnesses and deformities
in their children. According to Jeffords (1989), the victim images of soldiers are also
consistent with other representation of soldiers, following the war. ‘‘Rejected by an
American society that came to see these men as emblems of loss, moral failure or
380 national decline, Vietnam representation could effectively portray them as ‘victims’ of
society, government and the war itself’’’ (Jeffords, 1989, p. xiv); and in this case,
victims of contamination caused by the same powerful triad.
In contrast to the father and victim images, the pictures of soldiers and activists
document men taking action in public places. The images are of protests, men talking
385 to reporters, testifying in court, and politically organizing (Blumenthal, 1984;
Latimer, 1981). The uniformed soldier with a cane is in midstride, walking down the
street (Blumenthal, 1984). Protesters are seen demanding rights for Agent Orange
victims in marches and sit-ins. None of the father/victim images show soldiers in
uniform. None of the soldier/activist photographs are posed or have the subject
390 looking at the camera. In a more traditional masculine frame (Kilbourne, 2010),
the soldier/activist photographs appear to be offering the viewer their actions
(not themselves) for audience appraisal.
At the conclusion of the veterans’ trial in which the chemical companies agreed to
pay 180 million dollars to the twenty thousand vets who were experiencing illness,
395 disease, and death from Agent Orange, the lawyer Victor John Yannacone Jr.
announced the end of the Vietnam conflict was not the pulling out of Saigon in 1975,
but the conclusion to the trial almost a decade later, stating, ‘‘The veterans have won
the final battle of the Vietnam War’’ (Blumenthal, 1984, p. A1). But that would not
prove to be the case. The battle over the meaning of the war would continue for years
400 to come, including the continued fight for reparations for those victimized by the
decision to spray Agent Orange. It would also take another decade before the Agent
Orange visual narrative would be complete, bringing in a victim more imperiled than
their American counterparts, providing the opportunity for a reframing of the role
of the American soldier in the national, visual narrative and move the site of
405 contamination back to Vietnam.
The Vietnamization of toxic risk
While pictures of American victims of Agent Orange were making front pages and
were the subject of photographic essays in the USA, Jones Griffiths (2003) was unable
to sell any of his pictures of the afflicted Vietnamese for almost two decades (The
410 Digital Journalist http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0401/griffiths_intro.html).
The photojournalist, renowned for his book of war photography Vietnam Inc., would
later compile his images into an award-winning tome: Agent Orange: ‘‘Collateral
Damage’’ in Viet Nam. The disturbing nature of the photographs, the raw wound left
by the end of the war, and the lingering prejudice against the Vietnamese ‘‘enemy’’
415 may have been instrumental in the delay. As Fahmy (2010) explains, ‘‘The framing
of suffering occurs in a dichotomy that makes distinctions between the unworthy
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victims depicted as enemies and the worthy victims who suffer’’ (2010, p. 700). But
once the photographs of the Vietnamese visual narrative were in circulation in
newspapers and magazines, the startling images of children with grotesque deformities,
420 the renewed questioning of the connection to Agent Orange, and in 2004, a legal battle,
this time waged by Vietnamese victims, created a gestalt shift in the larger Agent
Orange narrative.
Roughly half of the images I collected for this time period were photographs of
Vietnamese children with obvious physical and mental disabilities. Missing limbs,
425 hydrocephaly, cleft palate, fused eyelids, deformed and twisted bodies, and vacant
stares fill the frames of these images. The children are most often pictured alone, in a
crib, on the floor, in a bed, with no parent, or caregiver in the frame. Without
question, the images are visually disturbing spectacles. While many of the illnesses of
the first generation of victims do not show (such as diabetes or cancer), the effects of
430 Agent Orange on the second and third generation is shockingly visible. Equally
important in terms of narrative potency, Buell (1998) argues that a heightened level
of persuasion occurs when the victims appear to have no choice. Children are
perceived to be the most innocent and powerless of victims.
In direct contrast to the American narrative, when Vietnamese children are
435 photographed with another person, it is almost always with the mother or female
caregiver. The women are shown holding, bathing, and feeding the children at home
(http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/08/hitchens200608). In the photo-
graphs, the mothers are consistently portrayed as passive, appearing helpless to the
circumstances that have befallen them. With downcast or horizon-gazing eyes, the
440 central feature of the mothers’ faces is despair.
These photographs may resonate with the viewer because of their similarity well
known to Western iconographic images. From Dorthea Lange’s Migrant Mother to
the Pieta, these photographs are recognizable in their subject matter and composi-
tion. And ‘‘while images must in some sense be familiar, they must also contain an
445 element of distinctiveness and be dramatized in a symbolic way if they are to make a
major impact’’ (Ferreira, Boholm, & Lo¨fstedt, 2001, p. 284). Western audiences can
instantly identify the commonplace image of a struggling mother and an endangered
child, but it is the deformity of the child and the sights of non-Western poverty
(woven floor mats for sleeping, conical hats, bare walls, dirt yards) that make the
450 Vietnamese photographs’ narrative distinct and compelling.
It is in the Vietnamese visual narrative that the identity of the American soldier is
reframed. While the discursive narrative continues to discuss the health issues of the
American service men and their families, the soldiers and their illnesses all but
disappear from the Vietnamese visual narrative. In the 108 print pictures in this
455 narrative, only two are of Americans still dealing with the effects of Agent Orange.
The choice to exclude the continued health problems of American veterans and
their children is made apparent in Nachtwey’s (2006) critically acclaimed photo
essay in Vanity Fair (http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/08/nachtwey_
photoessay200608). The magazine version of this essay has eleven images, all of the
460 second generation of afflicted Vietnamese. The online version has 21 images: 14 of
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Vietnamese and 6 photographs of American victims, including the now-bedridden
soldiers and their disabled adult children. One image shows a six-year-old boy
stricken with spinal bifida whose grandfather had been sprayed with Agent Orange in
Vietnam. Not one of the photographs of Americans was included in Nachtwey’s print
465 essay. In the transition from the American narrative to the Vietnamese, the bodies
at risk changed from the American soldiers to Vietnamese children. The site of
contamination too moves from US domestic spaces to the unfamiliar and distant
sites of Vietnam.
Science, uncertainty, and blame
470 The written text surrounding the toxic images tells a different story from its visual
counterpart. In the American narrative, four protagonists battle to create the
meaning of Agent Orange for the reading public: the chemical industry (especially
the seven chemical companies that ended up settling in the class-action lawsuit), the
scientists tasked with finding the ‘‘truth’’ about Agent Orange exposure and human
475 health, the federal government (primarily the Veterans Administration and the
Center for Disease Control), and the American veterans characterized by their illness
and their anger at the lack of support and compensation. Another player in the story
was Agent Orange itself, often characterized in terms of its chemical composition,
level of dioxin, as well as its means and volume of dispersal.
480 The written text centers on the lawsuit raised by American soldiers suing chemical
companies for the health effects they experienced from their exposure to Agent Orange.
Following the lawsuit, the story switches to one of fair distribution of compensation.
Because the standard for holding the chemical company responsible for veterans’
illnesses was causal, the discursive narrative is replete with discussions of the difficulty
485 of ‘‘proving’’ Agent Orange’s toxicity for human health. Competing science and
scientists, the inability to state without a doubt the health effects of environmental
toxins, and the federal government’s actions/inactions in funding scientific studies and
supporting ailing soldiers dominated the narrative. An underlying current of blame
(the Veterans Administration, the Center for Disease Control, the federal government,
490 the ‘‘system,’’ the chemical companies, etc.), liability, and conspiracy (burying evidence
and ignoring scientific findings) also motivate the narrative. The visual narrative does
not allow for blame or the details of conspiracy, focusing the attention on effect.
The written text surrounding the Vietnamese images has three primary characters:
the first-generation victims with Agent Orange diseases, their children and grand-
495 children (both alive with physical and psychological deformities, and those who were
miscarried or died at birth), and science. Unlike the Vietnamese visual narrative, the
discursive narrative gives relatively equal time to the Vietnamese veterans’ illnesses
and the damage to the second and third generations. Each story of an individual
follows a similar script: the person explains where and when he/she came into contact
500 with the defoliant, how Agent Orange smelled or tasted, what the spray did to the
surrounding environment (blackened plants, dead birds, oily looking water), actions
taken that may have exacerbated their exposure (drank or swam in the water, ate
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the fish), and the physical and psychological ramification of that contact to
themselves and their families (illness, death, cancer, multiple miscarriages, stillbirths,
505 and defects; for example, see Chandrasekaran, 2000).
Science is clearly the protagonist in both the American and Vietnamese discursive
narratives, in that it is portrayed as the entity that would provide knowledge and
insight into the chemistry of the defoliant and the truth of its human/environmental
effects. The visual narratives do not include science in that it does not have a clear
510 material presence that can be easily articulated in an image, though the inclusion of
a graph or chart explaining findings can be seen as a symbolic marker for the visually
amorphous ‘‘science.’’
The Vietnamese visual narrative constructs Agent Orange with a much simpler plot.
In addition to marginalizing science, there is no uncertainty. The slipperiness of
515 language that allows for allegations of Agent Orange damage to be attributed to a
source from ‘‘the Vietnamese government’’ or to be tamed with expert assertions of a
lack of proof does not exist in the visual narrative. For a comparative example, Science
magazine in 2007 examined ‘‘Agent Orange’s Bitter Harvest.’’ The third paragraph
carefully states:
520 Vietnam claims that the children’s disabilities were caused by parental exposures to
Agent Orange. Western scientists have long been at odds with their Vietnamese
counterparts over the strength of evidence correlating exposure to dioxin a toxic
contaminant of the herbicide and illnesses in individuals, particularly birth defects.
‘‘The Vietnamese government is using malformed babies as a symbol of Agent
525 Orange damage,’’ says Arnold Schecter, a toxicologist at the University of Texas
School of Public Health in Dallas, who remains cautious about making associations
after studying Agent Orange for more than 20 years. (Stone, 2007, p. 176)
The Vietnamese visual narrative offers no such qualifiers. In order, the first three
pictures in the article show (1) Agent Orange being sprayed over the rice paddies,
530 (2) the denuded landscape, and (3) young people with deformities. While most of
the articles from the sample did not contain all the three pictures in this particular
order, the visual narrative read across multiple sources consistently shows images of
spraying and images of deformity, making a correlation, if not a causal argument,
between the two in the mind of the viewers. The visual narrative is, therefore, capable
535 of providing clarity to the complicated and contested nature of toxic issues that
would be considered controversial if stated in words.
National, cultural, and environmental significance
Photojournalism is plagued with questions of its impact for those who suffer in front
of the camera. Noble (2010) contends that ‘‘icons of outrage...starving child, the
540 destitute earth quake survivor, the victim of torture...‘may stir controversy,
accolades, and emotion, but achieve absolutely nothing’’’ (pp. 187188). It took
30 years for the Vietnamese victims to get their day in court and even then they did
not prevail. A person could easily argue that the visual and discursive narratives of
Agent Orange failed to alleviate the misery for its greatest victims and, therefore,
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545 lacked impact. That said, Noble (2010) argues that a limited outcome for the image’s
subjects should not preclude us from analyzing how photographs work in other
capacities. In this case, the overarching Agent Orange narrative, the one that contains
both the American and Vietnamese stories, has altered the potential for it to be
incorporated into the national movement against toxins, and its gendered storyline
550 may have had an impact on the American national and cultural understanding of
toxic risk.
Even before the loss of the Vietnam War, American masculinity was being tested.
The demand for rights for women, people of color, and college students taking
place in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s shifted the ‘‘stability of the ground on which
555 patriarchal power [had rested]’’ (Jeffords, 1989, p. xixii). The Vietnam War further
challenged masculinity for the US soldiers. The American visual narrative shows
evidence of this crisis of masculinity. Instead of being caused by the loss of the war or
the failure of the US government, it was the toxic agents that were emasculating men
who were once strong and vital. The arrival in the Vietnamese narrative of a new and
560 even more powerless casualty of Agent Orange, the deformed Vietnamese child,
would significantly alter the American’s role in the toxic narrative, removing the
Americans/soldiers from the primary role of ‘‘victim.’’ At the same time, the role of
the American soldier was being transformed, the ongoing pain of the American
victims and their children disappears from the visual narrative almost entirely. In
565 addition, the place of contamination is no longer the American home, though the
toxins/effects still reside in the bodies and genes of the soldiers and their families, but
is visually reassigned back to Vietnam.
The shifting of risk from domestic to distant places can also be seen in a
discrepancy between the visual and written narratives. Dioxin poisonings in the USA
570 were sporadically included in discursive descriptions of Agent Orange: spraying
cattle, clearing rail lines, and roadways (specifically around Alsea, Oregon), illnesses
experienced by Kansas farmers, and the dioxin contamination in Times Beach,
Missouri, and in and around Monsanto and Diamond Alkali plants (all three directly
or indirectly linked to Agent Orange production). In the 184 pictures I covered in this
575 analysis, only two images of domestic contamination were included (Mansnerus,
1998; Severo, 1979a), making them outliers in the overarching visual narrative of
Agent Orange and dioxin.
Looking at the shift in the Agent Orange narrative, one could rightly argue that the
discursive and visual transference back to Vietnam was warranted. A greater number
580 of people there were harmed by the herbicide, Agent Orange, which is still present
in the soil of Vietnam (especially around old US air bases), and effects have been
even more horrific due to the amount of defoliant and length of exposure. That
acknowledged, the visual exclusion of the ill American veterans, their children and
grandchildren, and the contaminated places in the USA, may have allowed for a belief
585 that while there may be a risk of toxins ‘‘here,’’ it is insignificant compared to what we
are seeing over ‘‘there.’’ This construction of risk that allows Americans’ to feel a sense
of toxic immunity (or at least resistance) is contingent on the presence of a distant,
weak, feminized other, which may have influenced how Americans’ conceptualized
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and made decisions concerning toxins. No environmental policy altering the
590 production, use, or distribution of toxins or defoliants came in response to Agent
Orange.
5
This is perhaps more surprising when compared to the banning of DDT
that followed the publication of the book Silent Spring.
The visual disappearance of the American, domestic victims of Agent Orange may
have also lessened critics’ abilities to tie Agent Orange and its victims into the
595 national environmental consciousness. Waugh (2010b) argues that the racist and
imperialistic rationalizations for the use of Agent Orange make it one of the ‘‘greatest
environmental injustices of the twentieth century’’ (p. 115), yet it is all but missing
from the US environmental history. In a review of 17 environmental/environmental
movement texts including Merchant (2007), Warren (2003), Sale (1993), and Brulle
600 (2000), I found one reference to Agent Orange, in which Barry Commoner is quoted
as having said that relaxing environmental regulations would weaken the claims of
American Veterans exposed to Agent Orange (Egan, 2009
AQ2 ).
6
Though happening in
overlapping time periods and dealing with the similar issues of toxicity, gender, and
uncertainty (Peeples & DeLuca, 2006), the environmental justice and antitoxins
605 movements do not include the ongoing plight of the contaminated US soldiers and
the Vietnamese people, prohibiting the expansion of resources, knowledge, and
global reach that that the union might have allowed.
Toxic images
The previous sections have argued for how Agent Orange images function with a
610 specific emphasis on narrative, culture, place, and identity. In this last section, I draw
the broader conclusions from these discussions and apply them to an examination of
toxic images. With a seemingly unending stream of new chemicals being used in
previously unthinkable ways, it is important to understand how images visually
construct contamination both for critical analysis and political activism.
615 Toxic images are intrinsically tied to their larger cultural and national contexts
Images are the primary means of representing national or cultural hegemonic
perspectives. Fahmy argues, ‘‘Because of their ability to succinctly encapsulate
culture, subject, audience, while hiding the decision-making involved in produc-
tion of the image, photographs are especially adept at representing and reifying
620 national ideologies’’ (2010, p. 698). This is true for all photographs, but, I would
argue, it is especially important to note for toxic images. Many of the most potent
and destructive toxins are invisible or dull, making them seem unremarkable. For
toxins to have impact or be memorable, they need to be situated within a larger
narrative, as they often do not have the visual presence to create significance
625 on their own. In analyzing the visual construction of contamination, one must be
cognizant of the larger cultural story that is being told by and through the toxic
images, stories of national identity, of culture, of gender, of race, and, most
significantly, of power.
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The meaning of a toxic image is constructed through its visual narrative
630 As opposed to time- and space-specific catastrophes (tornados, hurricanes, fires, or
famines), toxins are not so easily contained. They move between elements (water, air,
soil, bodies) and are transported to sites far from their production. Some chemicals
change their structure, depending where they are located in the food chain, and as we
saw with Agent Orange, physical deformities can look different in the bodies of first
635 and second-generation victims. The uncertainty surrounding the effects of toxins
makes them even more difficult to visually capture. To create a compelling argument
for contamination requires a toxin, a victim, and a site (Ferreira, Boholm, & Lo¨fstedt,
2001), which, as we saw, may not be on the same continent, much less contained
within the same photographic frame. Multiple images are often necessary to create
640 the ‘‘story’’ of contamination.
Most importantly, an understanding of toxins comes through an examination of
the relationship between photographs, in that the effects of contaminants are found
causally. Too much fertilizer causes algae blooms, mercury emissions cause lower
IQs, and spraying Agent Orange causes reproductive deformities. Single images are ill
645 equipped to make the causal arguments necessary to establish contamination.
Images allow ‘‘testimony’’ from victims who may not be able to express their
suffering through language
In an interview, the photographer Grossfeld (2002) described how he chose what to
photograph when covering environmental issues:
650 I listened to what scientists observed was happening, but I kept my camera’s eye
fixed on the haunting faces of children...Their expressions and circumstances
bespoke the consequences of the environmental tragedies in ways that any retelling
of the experts’ verbal arguments never could. (p. 42)
Especially important for environmental poisoning, images can give an opportunity
655 for people to be involved in the social construction of a toxin, which might otherwise
be excluded due to language, translation, marginalization, and/or reduced capacity
due to dioxin’s manifestation in physiological and psychological abnormalities.
Images may then allow victims to participate in ways that written discourse does not,
though as with all images, the agency of the subject is always partial as the meaning of
660 the image is negotiated between photographer, subject, and viewer.
Images obfuscate the scientific, political, and environmental complexity of toxins
Images and the discursive text that surrounds them often do not tell the same
story. In their analysis of readers’ interpretations of images and text, Mendelson and
Darling-Wolf (2009) found that photographs can overwhelm and simplify a ‘‘more
665 complicated reality posed by the text.’’ (p. 801). They argue:
On a basic level, words are a symbolic sign system, while photographs are more
iconic and indexical...Words take more time to process, perhaps leading to a more
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reasoned response, while viewers’ response to pictures tends to be more immediate
and emotional. Photographs are more concrete, less abstract, than words, tied more
670 closely to a specific time and place. This is not to suggest that photographs cannot
represent more abstract concepts, but that they are more grounded in the
denotative. (p. 801)
With scientifically, politically, and culturally complex subjects like environmental
contamination, the ease, immediacy, and emotional resonance of the images can
675 overpower the written text. Amorphous concepts like science or complex bureau-
cracies like the Veterans Administration may be missing from the visual narrative or
represented synecdochically through a diagram or an ‘‘expert’’ shot. A written narrative
allows for a broad definition of ‘‘protagonist’’ or ‘‘antagonist’’ (dioxin, science,
government, etc.), with those roles most consistently being filled in the visual narrative
680 with individuals or places that stand in to represent less visual entities.
Images can lessen the uncertainty inherent in discussions of contamination
The simplification of toxicity that takes place in images may also function positively
to clarify risks that have been purposefully obfuscated, jargon-laden, or complex
beyond the grasp of an interested public. As was seen in the article in Science, the
685 uncertainty of the connection between Agent Orange and birth defects found in
the written explanation disappeared in the visual narrative.
Finally, as this analysis extrapolates from one case study to a larger discussion of
toxic images, it is imperative for the next stage of research to examine whether the
observations found here are consistent with other examples of contamination and
690 risk. Unfortunately, for all of us, there seems to be no end to the number and variety
of these examples for further study.
Notes
[1] For an excellent discussion of the limits of the visual for representing toxins, see Pezzullo
(2007).
695 [2] I define a visual narrative as a subject-specific sequence of images found within and across
media during a defined time period.
[3] Though the contamination of the homes at Love Canal is more frequently mentioned in
terms of impact on the nation’s environmental awareness, Agent Orange has received a
greater amount of media attention and for a longer period of time. Searching ProQuest
700 Newsstand, from 1980 to 2012, there were 3094 articles with ‘‘Agent Orange’’ in the title as
compared to the 916 articles 19782012 with ‘‘Love Canal’’ in the title. Perhaps even more
telling, since 2010 there have been 361 Agent Orange articles and only 10 focused on Love
Canal (again searching article titles for the key terms). Unfortunately, for this analysis,
articles from ProQuest are primarily saved as ‘‘full text’’ documents, which exclude the
705 pictures from the original article. In terms of cultural impact (a difficult concept to quantify)
in the 178 articles from the New York Times from 1979 to 2008 (again with Agent Orange in
the title), 19 articles (10.7%) were the lead for their section (A1, B1, C1 or on the first page of
a special edition).
[4] Archival photographs are difficult to obtain. Articles posted through online databases may
710 not include the images found in the original text, some are under separate copyright and are
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inaccessible, and many of those found on microfiche or microfilm are of poor quality,
excluding them from a visual analysis.
[5] That is not to say that there were no new policies that came in response to Agent Orange, but
the impact was focused on changes in military protocol and soldier health. President Ford
715 signed an executive order prohibiting the military use of defoliants, the Senate ratified the
Geneva protocol banning chemical weapons, and President H. W. Bush signed Agent Orange
Act of 1991, authorizing a long-term health study on soldiers who were exposed to the
defoliant (Waugh, 2010a).
[6] For a complete list of texts, please email the author.
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