Toxic tours and coastal contestation: a photo-essay of the local politics of desalination in California

Based on visual ethnographic research conducted in a California city from 2019 to 2022, this photo essay elaborates the politics of coastal desalination, the industrial practice of producing drinking water from saline sources. The images provoke a dialogue about how photography can be used, not only as an ethnographic passport, but also in a broader sense of encountering spaces, processes and organizations, thus assisting in unpacking various layers of society and how it (dis)connects with nature. Developing a ‘go-along’ ethnographic approach, such as taking ‘toxic tours’ with research subjects, the techniques of portraiture, landscape and documentary photography were used to produce a sequence of vignettes (as opposed to photographic series) that reveal interlocking modalities of contestation and questions of environmental (in)justices. The combination of images and text uniquely afforded by the format of the photo-essay engenders an understanding not only of the unique individual stories of the people embroiled in this coastal problem, but their connection to wider social structures amidst a seemingly ‘local’ siting struggle.