Bioluminescence of Chemical Warfare

Even though these images are already more than a couple of years old, I came across them for the first time at Grist yesterday, and found them intriguing. Laurie Tümer is a photographer from the midwest who turned her sights on the pesticide abuse that migrant farmers are regularly subjected to working in the fields.



Apparently, she discovered the idea while recovering from her own "near-fatal poisoning after her New Mexico home was sprayed," Grist reports. During her convalescence, she took her cue from the work of Professor Richard Fenske, a professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at UW, who also directs the Pacific Northwest Agricultural Safety and Health Center (PNASH). After studying his techniques for exposing the insidious toxic world which bathes humanity in swarms of secret clouds, she decided then she was going to make a book to reveal the hidden pesticidal landscapes as a warning to others. You can read an in depth interview with her in MOF&G.



To obtain this Glowing Evidence, she managed to substitute for a day the spray of pesticides at the Bustos Farm in New Mexico with fluorescent tracer dyes she then exposed to ultraviolet light, which illuminated a startling aerosol trail or nano-like constellation of the chem's geography, and offered a sort of terrain map of how easily pesticides are spread despite farmer's protective gear.




[All Images: Laurie Tümer]