This Lake Is A Picture Of Pollution

TORONTO - First it was the Cuyahoga, the river in Cleveland that was so polluted it caught fire. Now, there's Lake Ontario, the lake that's so full of chemicals it develops photographs.

Or so says Jeremy Lynch, a third-year photography student at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto. Lynch has a portfolio of black-and-white pictures of the Toronto lakefront developed, he says, in water from the lake itself. He says he added no chemicals.

Officials at Eastman Kodak say they are skeptical of Lynch's claims, but his professor at Ryerson, Bill Scanlon, stands behind his student.

``He's not pulling the wool over anybody's eyes, by any means,'' Scanlon said. ``People have done this before, but nobody paid that much attention.''

Nor does it come as any surprise to Toronto environmental and health officials that something is wrong with Lake Ontario, the source of this city's drinking water. ``This gives us a bit of a picture of the state of the water today,'' said Bob Pickett, Toronto's assistant director of water-pollution control.

Lynch got interested in the photographic potential of lake water last spring, when he was in a bar with some friends and a heavy rain was falling outside. Lynch gazed out at the downpour and thought about acid rain.

``I knew acid rain doesn't develop film,'' Lynch said, but he began thinking that maybe lake water would.

The photographer says he first

called various provincial environmental officials to ask where he could find water heavily contaminated with mercury and iron, chemicals that were used to develop daguerreotypes in the early years of photography. The officials refused to give out such information, he said, so he set off by himself to the Lake Ontario shoreline. He took samples of water from near places that struck him as promising: factories, a shipyard, an airport, a beach, the mouth of a canal, a ferry landing.

``Of course, I did it in the worst possible places,'' he said, adding that he made his rounds on calm days, when there were no waves to disperse the scum floating at the water's edge.

Next, Lynch exposed some film and put it into film-developing canisters with his various water samples.

Some water samples produced no negatives. Water from the beach, for instance, was full of bacteria that ate the emulsion off Lynch's film, he says. The best sample for developing turned out to be the one he took at the shipyard, where a rusting old cargo vessel was apparently leaching a lot of iron into the water.

Lynch's portfolio won't win any prizes for aesthetics; the pictures are rudely composed and the tones run generally from white to gray, without many true blacks to add interest. Lynch says he wants it that way. He said he tried to shoot Toronto's lakefront the way a tourist with a point-and-shoot camera would, going for simple views rather than thoughtful composition. He likes it that the lake water's suspended grit, fuzz and fibers left ghostly images on his prints.