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  • From: "Jill Bussiere" <jdt AT itol.com>
  • To: "Market Farming" <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Market-farming] Photographer Laurie Tumer shows the hidden paths of pesticides
  • Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2005 11:52:18 -0600

Sent on by Jill Bussiere, Wisconsin

Do You See What I See?
Photographer Laurie Tumer 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 Tumer. 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, Tumer 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, Tumer 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.

A worried mother discovers the secrets of pesticide testingTumer'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, Tumer
says, her photographs are a forum for processing information, conveying
dismay, and warning others.

Click here to see a gallery of Tumer's photographs.


- - - - - - - - - -

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.

http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2005/12/01/kloosterman/index.html#










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