Joanna Pocock at Aeon Magazine:
Seeing Tomoko’s young, contorted body was the moment I realised there was such a thing as horror and that those who are most affected are often victims of chance or fate. Here was a girl who, by dint of being born in Minamata rather than Ottawa, had been poisoned. All these years later, I am unnerved by the fact that Tomoko’s appearance was so unlike a healthy teenager that Sontag, writing about this very picture, could not make out that she was female, and referred instead to ‘Smith’s photograph of a dying youth writhing on his [sic] mother’s lap’. The youth was not male nor was she dying – she lived another five years. The composition of this photo echoes the classic pose of the Virgin Mary holding a dying Christ. Sontag sees it as a ‘Pietà for the world of plague victims’. Tomoko died for us all, is the subtext here – but it is important to note that she did not die from an uncontainable virus. She died because of a human-made environmental catastrophe.
more here.
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