Activist Art and Environmental Racism: Insider/Outsider

My presentation Activist Art and Environmental Racism considers the question of the artist's identity, in photographic works that protest environmental racism, by contrasting and comparing Navajo//Diné photographer Will Wilson's work in his Auto Immune Response series as well as in his Connect the Dots series and Fazal Sheikh's work in his Exposures series. Both photographers focus on radiation pollution of Navajo land from uranium mining. Both photographers combine landscape photography with portrait photography to illuminate the human cost of radiation pollution, and resistance to this form of environmental racism. Will Wilson is a citizen of the Navajo Nation, and he creates his Auto Immune Response and Connect the Dots photographs about the pollution his community faces from the perspective of a person who is of that community, while Fazal Sheikh created his series Exposures by working closely in collaboration with enrolled members of the Navajo Nation. In comparing and contrasting these works, I do not necessarily privilege one perspective above the other but instead seek to more deeply understand the ethics of activist art created to protest environmental racism. Drawing on the work of scholars Rob Nixon, in Slow Violence, and Dorceta Taylor in Toxic Communities, as well as the tradition of protesting environmental racism beginning with Robert Bullard and Benjamin Chavis, I connect photography of toxic communities with the embodied ethics of care, exploring ways that Wilson and Sheikh, from different angles, contest and interrupt settler-colonialist visual discourses and land theft.