Chemical Portraits: From Grievability to Accountability

In 2018, a photograph emerged of a woman clutching her two toddlers as they ran from smoking tear gas canisters fired by American border officials. The woman, Maria Meza, was later photographed holding one of the tear gas canisters up to the camera, her face red and swollen from the CS gas. While traditional witness media aims to visualize the link between what Elaine Scarry calls “the weapon” with “the force of bodily damage,” in this photo Meza directs the gaze of the spectator to the perpetrator that lurks within the frame of the photo, embodied in the name of the private company written across the canister, and the damning words: “Made in the U.S.A.” The photo can be grouped into a larger genre in which often anonymous protesters and eyewitnesses—from Egypt’s Tahrir Square to Bahrain’s Pearl Roundabout to the West Bank’s Aida refugee camp to the streets of Ferguson and beyond—are pictured holding tear gas canisters up to the camera, the names and locations of the manufacturing companies clearly visible. This paper investigates this distinct genre of witness photography, what I term “chemical portraits,” or images that make visible global circuits of toxic, so-called “non-lethal” weapons. More recently, Forensic Architecture’s machine-learning software has accelerated this process of corporate accountability to the point where the human can be removed altogether. Doing so radically shifts the frame of recognition from one of grievability to accountability, while raising privacy questions about the use of recognition software in protest situations.