In the Art Gallery of Ontario’s “Camera Atomica,” John O’Brian, guest curator and head of the art-history department at University of British Columbia, and Sophie Hackett, associate curator of photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario, have brought together images, archival materials and artworks from the past century to detail visual representations of nuclear technology and its often catastrophic effects. Canadian Art’s interim online editor Caoimhe Morgan-Feir and editorial resident Jaclyn Bruneau reflect on the show, noting its deft handling of disaster images, use of the apocalyptic sublime and careful tracing of photographic history, and question how the anxieties of a previous generation translate in the present day.
Jaclyn Bruneau: This was perhaps the first time I’ve thought about nuclear energy in a way that really moves beyond the hallmark image of the mushroom cloud. This exhibition made it feel relevant.
Caoimhe Morgan-Feir: Although I felt the subject still matters, I can’t get beyond the feeling that nuclear warfare is so specifically an aesthetic and an anxiety of the 1950s and ’60s. The relevancy, to me, is more the timeless idea of the horrors we act out on one another.
JB: Right. It’s impossible to not think about global warming, which is perhaps the parallel paranoia for our generation. In the introductory text, O’Brian raises four issues that emerge in the post-war condition, one of which is “nuclear weapons proliferation,” and others, which include “toxic waste disposal, climate change [and] geopolitical power relations.” I think these are connected to this point you raise about timelessness of the issues.
Also, the notion of the apocalyptic sublime is central: capturing the negative repercussions of technological advancements in a manner that is alluring, and even seductive, despite its reality. It’s pressing now since we’ve developed all of these technologies that are slated to kill us.
CMF: Right, and the relationship between these technologies and photography is central.
JB: Julia Bryan Wilson’s essay, “Posing by the Cloud,” postulates that the increasing sophistication of photography went hand in hand with nuclear warfare—that it felt necessary to create better machines to ensure these tests were properly documented, for press, dissemination and historical purposes, but also for scientific reflection. And then O’Brian’s essay, “Nuclear Flowers of Hell,” tells us that literally half of the world’s rations of motion-picture film at that time were used at the two atomic tests at Bikini Atoll: that speaks for itself.
CMF: There has always been a deeply entangled relationship between photography and war, or destruction. The exhibition made me question the function of witnessing photographs of suffering, such as Susan Sontag’s delineations between productive images of disaster and gratuitous ones. The exhibition never felt overly gratuitous.
To that end, you never quite know where the punctum is going to be, or which image will feel the most harrowing long after you’ve left. For me, it was actually the photograph of Vice Admiral Blandy and his wife celebrating Operation Crossroads, cutting into an angel food cake that has been shaped like a mushroom cloud.
JB: That was the first thing that really made me stop, and it makes me think about how the works function together as a whole, how the arrangement manages to prevent a situation where you just feel really terrible and empathy shuts you down.
There’s such a smart, varied selection of modes and media spanning a wide time frame (concentrated from 1945 to present), which gives us a sense of the progression of social thought. For example, there is a photograph that captures a moment just 10 minutes after the bomb was dropped, on which there are actual suspected radioactive pockmarks (Yoshito Matsushige, Dazed survivors huddle together in the street ten minutes after the atomic bomb was dropped on their city, Hiroshima, August 6, 1945). The photograph basically depicts the walking dead, and then right across the room (named Hiroshima and Nagasaki), there’s a scan on a lightbox of a dress that someone was actually wearing when the bomb dropped, a work made in 2007 (Ishiuchi Miyako, Untitled). The whole thing is varied and complementary—although not so concretely, which gives us room to draw our own associations.
CMF: Perhaps we feel a level of culpability. This is not a trauma theory exhibition—you come out of it feeling pretty guilty. It felt like I had a kind of privileged distance; that this was not my experience to claim.
JB: In terms of claiming, the Robert Frank photograph (Hoover Dam, Nevada, 1955) captures a postcard stand at the Hoover Dam, where there are three options for the buyer: an image of the Grand Canyon, the Hoover Dam or a nuclear explosion from the test site on the Yucca Flats. It conflates natural phenomena with the technology humans have developed to manipulate the natural for their benefit.
There’s this sense (with a nod to Walter Benjamin) that once you can put an image in your hand it becomes something differently entirely. You feel that it’s your own and it’s subject to your control, and your control can be ignorance. Experiencing images in that way inevitably leads further away from the initial moment, which carries the full weight of the event.
CMF: It’s difficult, because the mushroom cloud itself is a really beautiful object. Michael Light’s installation of appropriated photographs does a good job of underscoring that. On the one hand you’re fascinated by the cloud, which has this beautiful, slightly natural effect, but obviously it’s connected to such devastation.
That’s an element at work with the photograph of the cake as well: there’s something about this significant disconnect, and that’s the harrowing part of the whole show.
JB: There’s a photograph that I think illustrates this disconnect as well. It’s a photograph from a plane of the Nagasaki explosion (AP Wirephoto, Atomic Bomb Sends Smoke 20,000 Feet Above Nagasaki, 9 August, 1945) which manages to capture the distinctly two-tiered nature of an atomic explosion, where the darker column below is the debris from the ground, and the cloud above is perfectly formed, the result of the mechanics of the bomb itself.
The top part, which is clean, white and symmetrical, is what hails celebration, the mechanical feat orchestrated by humans, and the debris represents the obliteration, the dematerialization of what came before. The cutting of the cake is pretending that the black column of debris isn’t a part of the picture, or, more darkly, celebrating what that means too…
CMF: The level of disconnect is also so striking in the image of the potential investors rushing to buy stocks in Inco Limited. This is something we do all the time: turning a blind eye, for instance, and shopping at a fast-fashion chain. That’s an example of behaviour completely disconnected from its ethical ramifications.
JB: One other thing of interest is how this exhibition, and particularly in the final room (Uranium and Radiation) approached the representation of what is, relatively speaking, invisible: the effects of nuclear energy. It showed the immediate effects, but also looked into the 1980s and our current relationship to nuclear energy.
My favourite work in terms of this theme was by Shimpei Takeda (Trace #1, Kegon Falls and Trace #16, Lake Hayama (Mano Dam), 2012), where, in a cameraless process, he “expos[ed] photo-sensitive material to traces of radiation emitted from contaminated particles.” It visualized so strongly the effects of residual radioactive material; one sheet with material from one site looked like a galaxy, while the second sheet, from another location with less contamination, was black. It was so simple, and gave a sense of the unpredictability of the effects of radiation. Plus, while the process was straightforwardly scientific, the result garnered a very visceral response.
CMF: The final gallery really laid bare the class relations at work in issues of nuclear energy. It becomes so evident that, despite its universal threat, certain people are much more affected by these issues, and the individuals who have to deal with the ramifications are rarely in positions of power or authority over its development.
Vice Admiral Blandy and his wife, who were cutting cakes shaped like mushroom clouds, did not have to deal with dust from tests in their backyard.
