“Camera Atomica”

Documenting the photographic culture of the atomic bomb and nuclear energy, “Camera Atomica” unravels the interwoven histories of two of humanity’s most influential technologies—photography and nuclear fission. Curated by John O’Brian and premiering at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the exhibition is a timely survey of photographic fascination with the products, tools and materials of the nuclear age. Though international in scope, the exhibition highlights the not-often noted but significant role that Canada, and Ontario specifically, have played in the development of nuclear power—contributing not only to the project of uranium enrichment, but also significant engineering intelligence to nuclear programs around the world. Even as this exhibition was being developed, Iran and a group of six nations led by the US negotiated a deal substantially limiting Tehran’s nuclear ability over the next decade in return for lifting international oil and other financial sanctions. In this climate, an understanding of images as generative and productive forces in political culture has become increasingly central to the way we think about photography. As one of the overarching themes of the exhibition, the tension between visibility and invisibility not only defines the relationship between photography and science but also that of photography and politics.

O’Brian begins this visual history of nuclear technology with German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen’s 1895 discovery of the X-ray, represented in the exhibition by an X-ray of the physicist’s wife’s hand. It is back-lit within the frame, highlighting photography’s unique capacity to make visible the invisible, thus making it indispensible to many fields of scientific research, nuclear energy among them. This image underlines the awful poetry of the symmetrical language between photography and the bomb—that of exposure, heat, light and transformative chemistry. With the exception of the X-ray image, all works in the exhibition date from 1945 onwards, documenting the American development of the nuclear bomb, the evolution of uranium enrichment and nuclear power in Canada, the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and later disasters such as Chernobyl and Fukushima. These images and documents hint at the complexities and contradictions of our relationship to atomic power, whether weapons of mass destruction, nuclear energy or medical treatment. As O’Brian notes, photographers (and photography itself) are not only tireless documenters of the sublime spectacle of the atomic explosion, but have also facilitated nuclear research in its many capacities.

“The Bomb / also / is a flower,” writes William Carlos Williams, putting words to the rapid intermingling of forms brought on by the surplus of likenesses in the wake of the atomic age—a line of poetry also cited by O’Brian in the accompanying exhibition catalogue. Images such as Harold Edgerton’s rapatronic photographs from the 1950s and Berlyn Brixner’s photographs of the test explosions from 1945 defy easy categorization. The formal and even modernist composition of the many photographs of nuclear explosions underlines the concern for aesthetics inherent in the production of scientific images. Such formal qualities were clearly in the minds of a successive generation of photographers, including Barbara Kruger’s 1981 billboard project, “your manias become science” or “manias become your science,” included in the exhibition catalogue but unfortunately unavailable for the exhibition. Kruger’s use of the appropriated image of the iconic 1946 underwater bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in combination with politically charged text explores the slippage in meaning afforded by the profusion of photographic documentation of explosions. Similarly interested in intergenerational connections, photographer Mark Ruwudel travelled to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where Brixner was living just before his death, to meet him. Brixner gifted the four signed photographs to Ruwudel that are included in the exhibition. Almost directly on the other side of the wall, in the next room, Ruwudel’s The Witnesses (1), Nevada Test Site: Viewing Area for 14 Atmospheric Tests, at Frenchman Flat, 1951-1962, 1995, shows the remaining wooden benches placed for viewers of the test explosion, now just ghostly empty monuments to the spectacle of nuclear tests. Kenji Higuchi’s A Beautiful Day at Crystal Beach, Mihama Bay, 2004, shows citizens enjoying a swim in the water, with giant nuclear reactors looming in the background. Sandy Skoglund offers a comical take on a similar theme in her photograph, Radioactive Cats, 1980, constructing a scene of a mass of radioactive cats in a bleak, grey, bunker-like room.

The photographs that most literally represent the movement of forms from bomb to public are perhaps those of the trembling and ghostly marks left by bodies scorched onto buildings near the hypocenter of the blast at Hiroshima. These horrible phenomena call to mind recent work by Eyal Weizman on the forensic architecture of state-sponsored terror, which uses photography and architectural analysis to document drone attacks and military murders, bringing war crime charges to international courts. Weizman has described one particular case in which the shadows of the bodies of those murdered by a drone attack were etched onto the walls of their home by the ammunition contained within the bomb.

One of the strengths of O’Brian’s curation is the delicate treatment of the traditional division between archival and art photographs necessitated by such a survey. While roughly chronological, the rooms weave back and forth between images produced for vastly different ends, highlighting not only the breadth of photographic nuclear imagery but also the shifting meanings produced by such images in the public sphere. The exhibition traces the iconographical shift from images of power to images of danger (as if ever so neatly separated), itself capitulated via the stream of photographic images documenting the horrific aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Frequently disturbing, and at times steeped in deeply cynical humour, the material O’Brian has amassed represents an astonishing meditation on the spectacle of the atomic age. ❚

“Camera Atomica” was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, from July 8 to November 15, 2015.

Emily Doucet is a writer and researcher currently working towards a PhD in the history of photography at the University of Toronto.