{"id":61894,"date":"2015-08-03T12:00:50","date_gmt":"2015-08-03T11:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=61894"},"modified":"2015-08-02T15:24:07","modified_gmt":"2015-08-02T14:24:07","slug":"new-exhibit-camera-atomica-surveys-the-nuclear-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/08\/new-exhibit-camera-atomica-surveys-the-nuclear-age\/","title":{"rendered":"New Exhibit \u2018Camera Atomica\u2019 Surveys the Nuclear Age"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"camera<\/a>Growing up absurd came easily in North America in the 1950s and \u201960s when nuclear war would shift back and forth from being plausible threat to imminent occurrence, from sinister diplomatic bargaining chip to, of course, \u201cthe end of civilization as we know it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In suburban Regina, when our neighbours across our backyard built a bomb shelter complete with goops of cement covering their basement windows, bunk beds, shelves of canned food, a rifle and, puzzlingly, a big stack of Playboy magazines, I didn\u2019t know whether to be envious, scared or sarcastic (\u201cYou folks are a real nuclear family now!\u201d). Having seen photographs of what the first atomic bombs had done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945, I thought the shelter looked kind of, well \u2026 flimsy, pathetic, misguided even.<\/em> Yes, Regina was the capital of Saskatchewan and home to the fearsome Roughriders \u2013 but with a population of just 110,000, how big a target could it really be in the Russkies\u2019 quest for world Commie domination?<\/p>\n

These thoughts and much else were evoked earlier this week by a visit to Camera Atomica, the cleverly titled and excellent survey of atomic-age imagery and artifacts, roughly 200 in total, now on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto through mid-November. Curated by distinguished University of British Columbia professor and cultural historian John O\u2019Brian in association with Sophie Hackett, the AGO\u2019s associate curator of photography, the exhibition presents work \u2013 artistic, scientific, journalistic, documentary, quirky, satiric \u2013 from pretty much the entire post-Second World War period up to the present day.<\/p>\n

\u201cInteresting\u201d is sometimes a weaselly adjective used to damn with faint praise, but Camera Atomica is genuinely interesting in the dictionary sense of \u201carousing a state of curiosity or concern about or attention to something.\u201d If there\u2019s a particular feeling you\u2019re left with at exhibition\u2019s end, it\u2019s likely unease. On one hand, it\u2019s hardly a clarion call to the anti-nuke barricades; on the other, it\u2019s no apologia for the nuclear-industrial complex, no plea to cozy up to \u201cour friend, the atom.\u201d For Ontarians especially, seeing it is akin to a civic duty since, as Camera Atomica points out, Ontario is one of the biggest nuclear \u201cjurisdictions\u201d on the planet and far and away Canada\u2019s most nuclear province. More than 55 per cent of the province\u2019s electrical power, in fact, comes from utilities such as Lake Huron\u2019s Bruce Power, the world\u2019s largest nuclear generating facility. It was uranium ore, transported to Port Hope, 110 kilometres east of Toronto, for refining from the Northwest Territories, that was used to develop the \u201cLittle Boy\u201d bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War.<\/p>\n

For O\u2019Brian, the overarching ethos of the exhibition is what he calls \u201cthe fatal interdependence between the camera and nuclear fission \u2026 nuclear events,\u201d a relationship \u201cthat was there from the beginning.\u201d One of the most arresting images in the exhibition, lent by Munich\u2019s Deutsches Museum, is the oldest: the very first X-ray, taken by German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen of his wife\u2019s hand in 1895. (Looking at the spectral image, Mrs. Roentgen reportedly said: \u201cI have seen my own death.\u201d) Also in Camera Atomica: a copy of the Oct. 7, 1945, issue of the New York Sunday Mirror featuring on its cover the first-ever published colour photograph; shot by Jack Aeby, it\u2019s of the secret atomic detonation that occurred in New Mexico July 16, 1945, the one prompting physicist Robert Oppenheimer\u2019s famous utterance: \u201cNow I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.\u201d A related bit of ephemera displayed is the leaflet the Americans dropped on close to a dozen Japanese cities several days before the Hiroshima attack, warning that the U.S. had \u201cthe most destructive explosive ever devised by man\u201d which it would \u201cresolutely employ\u201d should military resistance continue. On the leaflet\u2019s front: a photo of five Superfortress aircraft dropping bombs.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, there are images aplenty of mushroom clouds \u2013 what O\u2019Brian calls \u201cthe meta-symbol\u201d of the onset of the nuclear era, \u201cthe logo of logos,\u201d the flash of the explosion being, of course, the ultimate flash-bulb. Sometimes the cloud is played, as it were, for bleak laughs, as in artist Bruce Conner\u2019s Bombhead,<\/em> a send-up of sorts \u2013 or should that be blow-up? \u2013 of Magritte\u2019s 1964 painting Son of Man.<\/em> The Bob Light\/John Houston poster from 1983 for Gone with the Wind \u2013<\/em> \u201cthe film to end all films\u201d \u2013 stars Ronald Reagan as Rhett Butler and Maggie Thatcher as Scarlett, with an incinerated Atlanta in the background. Sometimes the laughs are unintentional, the most risible example being a 1946 press agency photo of U.S. Vice-Admiral Spike Blandy and wife cutting a large angel-food cake shaped like a mushroom plume to mark the completion of Operation Crossroads, the first detonation of atomic devices post-Nagasaki. The explosions that are Mrs. Blandy\u2019s hat and corsage are a perfect complement to those on the cake.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, too, there\u2019s an eerie beauty. A series of photographs by Harold Edgerton, MIT engineer and inventor of the electronic flash, capturing the first milli-seconds of a 1950s atomic-test blast, calls to mind the floating membranous eyeballs and heads in Odilon Redon paintings. Ishiuchi Miyako\u2019s large 2007 chromogenic print of what seems to be a shredded indigo dress worn by a woman in Hiroshima simultaneously sears the mind and ravishes the eye, like one of Irving Penn\u2019s luscious platinum palladium photos of crushed cigarette boxes from the 1970s.<\/p>\n

Exotic is a descriptor that\u2019s out of fashion in the contemporary art world, but how else to describe the chandelier hanging from the ceiling in the exhibition\u2019s first space? This curiosity, created by Japanese-Australian artists Ken and Julia Yonetani in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, is one of 31 antique chandelier frames refitted with uranium glass beads and UV bulbs for a 2012 installation called Crystal Palace: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nuclear Nations.<\/em> Thirty-one is the number of countries with acknowledged nuclear programs and each chandelier is sized to represent the number of operating nuclear facilities in each country. Fittingly, it\u2019s the Canadian chandelier displayed at the AGO, its beads radiating an acid-green glow at once lovely and faintly sinister in the semi-dark. Visitors are going to be drawn to it like \u2026 well, like moths to a flame.<\/p>\n

Camera Atomica is at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto through Nov 2015.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theglobeandmail.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Growing up absurd came easily in North America in the 1950s and \u201960s when nuclear war would alternate from sinister diplomatic bargaining chip to \u201cthe end of civilization as we know it.\u201d… If there\u2019s a particular feeling you\u2019re left with at the exhibition, it\u2019s unease. On one hand, it\u2019s hardly a clarion call to the anti-nuke barricades; on the other, it\u2019s no apologia for the nuclear-industrial complex, no plea to cozy up to \u201cour friend, the atom.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[167],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61894\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}