Nuclear photography: Making the invisible visible

Abstract

In this essay, the author explores whether nuclear catastrophe is beyond the reach of art. A documentary photographer, she reflects on her own work capturing the lives of those who lived downwind of the nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site in the United States. Many years after being immersed in the project for a decade, and documenting the effects of 1,000 nuclear devices that had exploded above this population, the author finally arrives at the answer to her question.

When the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, two types of photographs captured this gripping moment: those that showed a mushroom cloud on the horizon, and those that depicted devastated cities and the many survivors who had been burned beyond recognition. From that year until today, 125,000 nuclear warheads have been constructed, and nine countries have nuclear weapon capability (Kristensen and Norris, 2013). So when thinking about art and destruction, it might be fair to ask: Is art at all effective in reminding the world of the destructive impulses that lead to war, and is art effective in subduing humanity’s urge—and possibly need—to fight wars? The answer, at least in terms of art in the nuclear age, is possibly no. Art, when produced at a distance—from an artist studio or loft, say—cannot stop nuclear proliferation. It cannot stop a war.

But is nuclear catastrophe always beyond the reach of art? In 1979, by then an established photo artist, I found myself tussling with this very question as I transitioned from experimental media to documentary photography focused on the nuclear age—namely, art that could activate others. Though artists had managed to create influential and seminal works—of course, one need not look any further than Picasso’s Guernica, which, in 1937, alerted a sleeping world to the issues of war and peace—I set out to find the contemporary artists who were doing so and who could influence my work.

I was introduced to the work of Barbara Donachy, a Denver-based artist, who, in the early 1980s, created extremely large-scale sculptural installations on the nuclear and military-industrial complex. For example, in her work Amber Waves of Grain, she brought together more than 70 people to create 31,500 ceramic objects—ceramic cones, which represented the total number of warheads in the US arsenal at the time, and miniature ceramic bombers, submarines, and missiles to represent the three delivery systems for strategic nuclear weapons. Viewed by thousands of people at exhibits in 15 American cities, as well as in Berlin, Germany, her work of art showed in both a graphic and beautiful way the dimensions of the nuclear weapons enterprise. ¹ In summing up its effectiveness, I cannot say it better than a visitor to her exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science in 1985: “This makes the obviously insane unforgivable.”

Using only clay to articulate the raw statistics of the confidential aspects of the country’s military culture, Donachy created work that was both emotional and provocative. It provoked in its viewers sufficient rage so as to be a teachable moment, embodying Jonathan Swift’s conception that “vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.”

Swift’s words, in fact, were in my head in 1979, when I began researching what US President Dwight Eisenhower, some 18 years earlier, had famously warned could destroy the country’s democracy: the military-industrial complex. At the time, I had acquired some recently declassified Atomic Energy Commission documents from the 1950s that were both riveting and disturbing. One of the commission’s then-confidential memos described the people living downwind of the Nevada Test Site during the atmospheric atomic testing era as “a low-use segment of the population.”

It was that illuminating moment—holding such raw bigotry in my own hands—that prompted me to move to Utah to research, investigate, contemplate, and document the effects of 1,000 nuclear devices that had been exploded above and below the land of the Shoshone Nation. My goal was to document the effect of those detonations on three groups of people: those who lived closest to the test site, as far north as South Dakota; the workers at the site; and the soldiers exposed to bombs at close range by military fiat, as an experiment to see what a soldier could endure on the atomic battlefield.

Radiation is invisible. You can’t see it, feel it, taste it, or smell it, yet in the proper doses it can maim and kill. Documentary photography, however, can make the invisible visible. In American culture at that time—and particularly the culture that made up my life, academia, and the art world—no one was less visible than a Mormon rancher or housewife living downwind of the Nevada Test Site. As a New York artist told me, quite dispassionately, before I set out for Utah: “Nobody lives out there—nobody important anyway.”

Nevertheless, I surrendered to the bomb in 1983 and moved from my loft on Mercer Street in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood to St. George, Utah—a predominantly Mormon town best known for being “always plaster[ed]” by fallout, as Chairman Lewis Strauss had put it at an Atomic Energy Commission meeting in 1955. “It is certainly all right, they say, if you don’t live next door to it,” he added (GPO, 1979).

These callous statements reflected the rationale behind moving nuclear testing from the Pacific, where it was an enormously expensive endeavor, to the test site in Nevada in 1951. The United States government—and, thus, eventually the American people—viewed this area downwind of the site as “relatively uninhabited.” (As years passed, even “downwinders,” as they became known, joked about themselves being “relative uninhabitants.”) But as unimportant as their lives and livelihoods were to the A-list of the nation’s capital and New York City, each person I interviewed revealed a profound depth of patriotism. Mostly of the Mormon faith, they said they felt betrayed by a government that they believed was “inspired by God,” according to the tenets of their religion. ²

After 10 years of conducting interviews and preparing the photographs and manuscript, I published American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War.

In the 1990s—several years after my book was published and New York’s International Center of Photography exhibited my photographs—I was invited to participate on a nuclear weapon panel with Theodore Taylor, among others, at the Iowa State University of Science and Technology at Ames, which played a critical role in the Manhattan Project. Taylor had worked at Los Alamos during the Cold War and was best known as a designer of streamlined fission bombs “of minimal size and maximal bang.” In the late 1950s, he and physicist Freeman Dyson also directed Project Orion, an endeavor to develop nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft. Taylor’s designs were made into weapons and tested at the Nevada Test Site—an area that, decades later, ultimately would be a hotspot for thousands of cases of thyroid cancer. As Taylor admitted, by the mid-1960s he was disaffected by the apocalyptic potential of these weapons and began to advocate for nuclear disarmament. ³ By 1980, he had become, in his own words, a “nuclear dropout” who wanted to put the genie back in the bottle, and he spent the rest of his life pursuing a global shift from fossil and nuclear fuels to renewable energy. “Rationalize how you will, the bombs were designed to kill many, many people,” he says in John McPhee’s book The Curve of Binding Energy: A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor. “If it were possible to wave a wand and make fission impossible—fission of any kind—I would quickly wave the wand” (quoted in Fox, 2004).

After our panel, Taylor invited me for drinks and dinner at a local restaurant, where we sat in a booth and traded stories. I carried a copy of American Ground Zero with me in my briefcase, and after we ate I asked if we could take a look at it together in a quieter place. We sat down across from one another in two armchairs near a fireplace and leafed through the book. He scrutinized the portraits of the downwinders, test site workers, and atomic veterans, and, as I told him their stories, he became increasingly upset. “In all your years in the nuclear weapons industry, did you ever think about the people living downwind of the test site, where your bombs were set off, and what it might be doing to their health and their lives?” I asked him. Startled, Taylor stood up from his armchair unsteadily, and moved toward me. Suddenly he dropped to his knees, put his head in my lap, and said, “I never gave it a thought.” And he wept.

Despite his many years of work to put the genie back in the bottle, Taylor was driven by a personal fear that nuclear materials could be used by terrorists or that the bombs he designed might be used in war. “Sooner or later, a terrorist group or a psychotic working alone will build a nuclear device,” Taylor told the Washington Post in the early 1980s (Holley, 2004). What the terrorist wants is attention, he said, and a nuclear threat is “an instant display” (Holley, 2004). For whatever reason, the damage done by past nuclear tests had never penetrated the denial that he—and perhaps other nuclear weapon designers and builders—had used to keep himself at his work. That evening with Theodore Taylor, I indeed learned the answer to the question: Is nuclear catastrophe always beyond the reach of art? No, it is not.

I had made the invisible visible to the most important scientist I would ever confront about America’s nuclear testing program. He was an archetypal figure, later described in his obituary in the New York Times as “the creator compelled to destroy his own creation after it runs menacingly amok” (Fox, 2004). In contrast, I was a humble documentary photographer who had learned her trade solely in the field while spending a dozen years interviewing those who had experienced their own secret nuclear war. My prospects for completing this project and publishing it had always been so unlikely, just as meeting someone as significant as Ted Taylor had been. The dozen years I had spent preparing this work for this dear man had been worth it.