Nuclear shock waves ripple through AGO exhibit
Camera Atomica makes clear the anxiety surrounding atomic bombs is still alive
On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. By the time the second one fell on Nagasaki, three days later, the world had already irrevocably changed into a darker, more horrifying place.
In the wake of a six-year war that had claimed millions of lives, the nightmares of which, like the Holocaust, had been freshly revealed, that’s saying something.
Still, maybe nothing between that ugly day and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 has had so profound and wide-ranging an effect on our species’ fragile psyche. Camera Atomica, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s thoughtful unpacking of the bomb’s persistent and ongoing shock waves through the culture, looks to provide an exacting measure of the impact.
Exacting because the show, more than a decade in the making — the product of some persistence by guest curator John O’Brian — is tightly focused on the relationship between the nuclear age and i ts representation through photography. This only makes sense: the end of the Second World War coincided with a shift in photography from specialist’s medium to amateur’s hobby and that proliferation of images played no small part in the nuclear age’s imprint on our psyche. The show’s span, from mere months before the Japanese bombings to the present day, tells a story of aman-made Armageddon viewed (at least by its makers) from a safe distance to one that morphed to an energy source we’ve been told, time and again, was safe for us to live beside.
That, suffice to say, is the subject of some debate and the show does well to span a complex history with a slate of images charting the nuclear age’s evolution. The show, split in three parts, travels from the bombs’ impact in 1945 through nuclear escalation, Cold War propaganda and finally, the lasting fallout of the seismic shift the nuclear age has produced.
In a show with more than100 images, I’m loath to extract emblems, but some stand out: an unknown photographer’s pictures of the devastation, captured 10 minutes after impact on the ground in Hiroshima, still carry a powerful bewilderment. The menacing blur of an American B-52, captured by Shomei Tomatsu as it ascended over Japan from new U.S. military bases just a few years after the detonations, disarms.
In the ensuing years, a different tenor of photography emerged, celebrating the technological achievement the bomb represented as the mushroom cloud became a self-promotional symbol of U.S. military dominance.
Bomb tests in the Nevada and New Mexico desert became among the most photographed events in the world, images spread widely by the military as blatant chest-beating.
Ahigh-ranking military official cutting into a cake topped with the telltale funnel and plume of an atomic explosion smacks of bad taste; an image of white-clad men with goggles seated in Adirondack chairs, bathed in the white glow of a test detonation is weirdly festive.
As the U.S. goaded the Soviets into an arms race, responses in the culture proliferated through the ’70s and ’80s: Nancy Burson’s Warhead (1982), a Cold War mash-up of the portraits of Reagan, Brezhnev, Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping, or Sandy Skoglund’s Radioactive Cats (1980), an ash-grey room populated by bright-green irradiated felines. It speaks of the apex of nuclear-age anxiety. It’s particularly germane here, in Ontario, which all by itself ranks third in the world, just behind France, in its reliance on nuclear power.
And then, the fallout: David McMillan’s eerie images of abandoned nu- clear zones in Russia, Ed Burtynsky’s uranium-mining wastelands in Elliot Lake. Toronto photographer Donald Weber’s series on Chornobyl’s ongoing nuclear trauma brings us right up to date: he was the first photographer into the exclusion zone at Fukushima, when the nuclear power plant melted down in 2011.
This, in the end, is Camera Atomica’s message: the bomb’s shock waves are not a thing of history but a very real present. How little, it seems, we’ve learned. Camera Atomica continues to Nov. 15. See ago.net/camera-atomica for more information.