Susan Sontag, in her essay entitled About photography (DeBolsillo) tells us about the work of the American photojournalist Eugene Smith who, in the late sixties, arrived in Minamata, the Japanese city that suffered an outbreak of methylmercury poisoning. Thousands of people were affected by the catastrophe, although they would not be compensated until 1996, years after the discharges into the sea from the chemical company Chisso were assimilated by fish, crustaceans and mollusks.
It was in 1968 that the Japanese government informed the population that the cause of “Minamata disease” was none other than the consumption of highly toxic fish and seafood. When it became official that the aforementioned chemical company was dumping huge toxic quantities of methyl mercury into the water, it was already too late. The government announcement came a dozen years after the first documented case, which dates back to the spring of 1956, when a 5-year-old girl presented spasms and problems with her motor functions. From then on, a nightmare began for the inhabitants of the Japanese city, as they not only suffered neurological disorders such as paralysis and mobility problems, but also suffered vision loss, as well as dementia and death within a few weeks of the onset of symptoms.
Eugene Smith spent three years documenting the disaster of bodies ravaged by chemical excess. One of his most famous photographs is the one entitled Tomoko’s bath (Tomoko in her bath) where a mother bathes her sick daughter. The photo is dated December 1971. The image is a cry of protest; the daughter was born sick. Her body had absorbed enough mercury to die of poisoning when she was in her mother’s womb. But she did not die; Tomoko did not die, she came into life paralyzed and deformed.
The mother knew that, had it not been for her daughter, she would not have rid her body of all the mercury she had ingested. To a certain extent, Tomoko had saved her mother’s life. That is why Smith’s photograph is so significant; the burden of pain and the composition of the image remind us of Michelangelo’s Pietà, the sculpture that represents the Virgin Mary holding the dead Christ after the crucifixion. Smith’s social realism reaches drama and, with it, denunciation; a chemical company causing an environmental disaster that, by extension, affects human beings.
For those who don’t know, methylmercury is a compound that is easily absorbed by the body of fish, and that is why larger fish accumulate the highest concentration of this compound. From there, it passes into our body when we eat fish and the toxicity affects the central nervous system, that is, the brain and spinal cord, although it also affects the liver and kidneys. We must not forget that it is a neurotoxin that causes havoc.
Smith kept photographic records of this, “documenting —in the words of Susan Sontag— a suffering that arouses our indignation and makes us turn away because they are excellent photographs of agony.”
The stone axe It is a section where Montero Glezwith a prose-like will, exercises its particular siege on scientific reality to demonstrate that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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