Camera atomica

Abstract

Photographs have a crucial place in the representation of the atomic age and its anxieties. This book examines narratives beyond the technological sublimethat dominates much nuclear photography, suppressing representations of the human form in favor of representations of B-52 bombers and mushroom clouds. The book proposes that the body is the site where the social environment interacts with the so-called atomic road: uranium mining and processing, radiation research, nuclear reactor construction and operation, and weapons testing. Co-published with the Art Gallery of Ontario to accompany a major exhibition there in 2014. Cameras have both recorded and - in certain instances - provided motivation for the production of nuclear events. Their histories and technological development are intimately intertwined: at McGill University in the early 1900s, for example, Ernest Rutherford employed photography to identify the properties of radioactive materials, winning a Nobel Prize for his research, and at Los Alamos in the mid-1940s, Julian E. Mack and Berlyn Brixner designed specialized cameras for measuring the blast yield of nuclear weapons.

Contents

Foreword / Matthew Teitelbaum -- Acknowledgements / John O'Brian -- Introduction: Through a radioactive lens / John O'Brian -- Test and protest -- Nuclear flowers of hell / John O'Brian -- Posing by the cloud : US nuclear test site photography in process / Julia Bryan-Wilson -- Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- Hidden and forgotten Hibakusha : nuclear legacy / Hiromitsu Toyosaki -- Atomic photographs below the surface / Blake Fitzpatrick -- Uranium and radiation -- Through the lens, darkly / Iain Boal and Gene Ray -- Visible and invisible -- The wrong sun / Douglas Coupland -- Radical contact prints / Susan Schuppli.