And Then, What’s Left?

Historically, mercury was used to isolate silver from its ore. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 6,350 tonnes of mercury were released into the Carson river, Toinahukwa (Northern Paiute), Watahshemu (Washoe), across two decades of intense mining between 1850–1870.

Silver processing mills lined the Carson river and their stamp mills were powered by its water. Stamps pounded the extracted ore 24 hours a day, and mercury washed into the water from over 200 mills lining the river.

Today, cottonwood and willow trees follow the river’s course. In the breeze, their leaves sound like a symphony of rain sticks. They provide yellow tones to the steady brown palette of the desert. The river is now dry, but the trees mark where the water once flowed. Willow is a mercury-remediation species; it draws up mercury through its root systems and accumulates it in its botanical matter (Greenplate et al. 2023). Working at small scales, it detoxifies mercury-contaminated spaces.

It is important to state that while existing as part of an extracted landscape, Silver City is not a neighbourhood experiencing extreme poverty and precarity, as is the case with many other neighbourhoods in the shadows of extractive industries (Auyero & Swistun 2009; Nading 2020). Generally, Silver City residents are not concerned with mercury contamination. However, ethnographies examining polluted landscapes help shed light on how people make sense of and cope with toxic dangers.

Some of the world’s most acute respiratory issues associated with extractivism locate in La Oroya, Peru, and its silver refinery (Li 2015). Residents in this smelter town have been subjected to toxic emissions for nearly a century. Fabiana Li’s research analyses how pollutants are perceived, defined, and dealt with (ibid). She asks when, and for which parties, does pollution matter, and when does it not? Conceptions of pollution, emerging from different forms of knowledge production, made pollution visible and invisible at different times: ‘the existence of pollution is dependent on the particular practices that bring it into being’ (ibid: 37). In this way, pollution has a multiplicity: it came to matter when it was conceived as uncontainable, when ‘toxicity beyond the smelter and its effects on the population at large’ were measured (ibid).

My engagement with the toxicity of photographic silver processing examines the sources of people’s perceptions of toxicity. This extends to how and why people may not feel threatened by toxic habitats, or may mis-recognise them. What is it that instils apathy or indifference? What shapes how surrounding dangers are interpreted?

Further up the hillsides away from the riverbed, is the occasional Pinyon pine tree. Pines are a species that colonise and grow easily in extreme environments, including rock and almost-deserts. They cannot survive easily in nutrient rich soils with warm temperatures, because they are outcompeted by broad-leaf species that quickly out-shade them. Prior to silver extraction in the 1860s, desert landscapes of Silver City were forested with Pinyon pines. Paiute peoples relied on the nuts in harsh winters, and Pinyon jays used the forests for breeding and nesting sites (Bettinger 1976).

Pinyon jays are a seed-storing species that can bury thousands of seeds each year. A flock of 250 Pinyon jays can store up to 4.5 million seeds in a single autumn. Pinyon jays would store their seeds and occasionally forget them, inadvertently planting the next generation of trees. Today, Pinyon jays are rare in Silver City. Their relatives, scrub jays, are common, but the Pinyon forests remain scarce. Silver is not extracted from abstract spaces, but spaces that are animated and responsive:

The ground creeks and collapses

Tarantula migration pathways are disturbed

Mercury contaminants settle in river systems

bioaccumulating today

in trout and willow

Indigenous peoples fished the trout and chewed the willow -

to soften and weave the branches;

one organism’s nutrient is another’s poison

Pinyon pines fell to wedge the jaws of the earth open

to reveal its silvery teeth.

Pine nuts became scarce and Pinyon jays no longer buried the seeds

no longer planted the next generation.

These entanglements remind us that the extraction of silver is an inscription on the desert, and the desert is a landscape of affect. Nineteenth century silver extraction is not part of the past. It crosses multiple worlds and temporalities; it is an active, violating force of the present, that compromises ecologies and future lives that are in-the-making.

Between Aperture and Earth: Plant-based Photographic Chemistry

I return to the humble Yellow rabbitbrush. This species, like almost all plants, links the botanic world directly with the chemical world of analogue photography. This is because plants hold special compounds in them that can be used to generate photographic chemistries. These compounds are called phenols.

Phenolic compounds are critical to plants because they help them tolerate extreme conditions like drought and infection (Dai & Mumper 2010). Very high levels of UV radiation, combined with low rainfall, can increase the production of dangerous molecules that cause cellular damage. The plant responds to this by increasing phenol production.

Phenolic compounds are also a basic element of photographic developer chemistry (The Sustainable Darkroom 2024). This is the chemical used to develop the initial image in analogue photography. It is the first of a three-step process; the photograph is then ‘stopped’ and ‘fixed’ in separate chemical baths. These keep the image from wandering off and continuing its exposure to light.

Developer chemistries can be mixed by hand, using phenolic compounds, vitamin c, and sodium carbonate. There exists a whole world of analogue photographers that embrace DIY photo-chemistry (The Sustainable Darkroom 2024). Their recipes range from using scraps of cardboard to discarded tea leaves; anything that has emerged from the plant world. Phenolic compounds can be isolated by boiling plant matter with water. Mixed with vitamin c and sodium carbonate, the plant-based developer is complete (ibid).

When the camera shutter releases, light reflected off a photographed scene hits the film inside. In this micro-second, electrons move, and the silvered film changes form - it becomes exposed silver. A photographic image has been generated, but it is still hidden. It needs developer chemistry to bring it into the visible world.

In the complete darkness of a developing tank, developer chemistry interacts with the film surface and a molecular dance begins. The exposed silver kind of bursts into action. In the chemistry world, it is known as autocatalytic. This means that silver speeds up the formation of its own image development - it explodes into visibility. As soon as a few silvered particles are touched by the chemistry, the reaction expands by itself. This chain-link reaction is what you see in a darkroom tray when a photograph slowly emerges.

Making photographic chemistry from species growing in abandoned silver-mining sites is one way of foregrounding the agencies of ecologies that are touched by silver. This way, stories of silver mining are not confined to the physical edges of roadside plaques and historic markers. They can be read in the Yellow rabbitbrush that stabilises mountainsides honeycombed for silver. They can be seen in sites of attempted mass destruction: the Indigenous lives that were violently uprooted, and the Pinyon forests that recede into the distance.

Looking to the ground, water, and plants that enable photographs provides a different reading of photographic indexicality. The photograph may point to one referent, but its silver points elsewhere.

It is in these scattered spaces that this research situates itself.