The mushroom cloud and the atomic sublime

Adapted from an essay written for 'Critical Approaches to Art History' (Yale University, 2016).

A new sign: The atomic sublime and the issue of artistic engagement

On July 16, 1945, at 5:29 a.m., the world’s first atomic bomb—code-named “Trinity” by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist charged with overseeing its development—detonated above the desert sands of southern New Mexico. Two hundred miles away, in Los Alamos, scientists who had participated in the development of the bomb watched the explosion from their houses. The force from the explosion shattered glass windowpanes in Silver City, one hundred and eighty miles away. The heat from the blast—some ten times hotter than the center of the sun—fused the gypsum sands of the desert floor into a new type of radioactive glass that has never formed except as a result of atomic bomb tests. The mushroom cloud formed by the explosion rose more than seven and a half miles into the sky, about two miles into the atmosphere higher than Mt. Everest. Trinity’s radioactive fallout traveled as far as Indiana, settling into rivers and finding its way into paper mills where it eventually contaminated the cardboard boxes used to package the Eastman Kodak Company’s film.

The Trinity test was far from the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated, but it represents the first moment in history when human activity came to be on equal terms with natural phenomena. Suddenly, a technology existed that could ignite matter to temperatures hotter than any star, that could elicit seismic tremors detectable across continents, and that could disperse radioactive matter into the upper atmosphere and across the globe. Witnesses to the Trinity test described what they saw by evoking metaphors with the natural world. Oppenheimer, famously, could only describe the brightness of the light emitted by the bomb in terms of a verse from the Hindu holy book Bhagavad Gita: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one." Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell, who watched the explosion from less than six miles away, went a step further, hailing Trinity as nothing less than the pinnacle of technological innovation and artistic creation: “The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous, and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately.”

Atomic explosions were unprecedented in their scale as human-instigated events. Those tasked with recording these events verbally, as Farrell’s description suggests, struggled to find terms to describe them that did not, somehow, also evoke connotations of natural spectacle or of spiritual experience. This difficulty extended to those seeking to make sense of the first atomic explosions visually, through photography. What would become the major photographic icon of atomic visual culture—the mushroom cloud—had little to which it could be compared beyond visions of cosmic phenomena or of a coming apocalypse.

Photographing the bomb

Even the process of recording a mushroom cloud on film proved nearly impossible for photographers. Only one well-exposed color photograph of Trinity exists; all others appear as overexposed, abstract expanses of white-hot matter over the desert floor. The photographic equipment aboard the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb over Nagasaki (on August 9, 1945) could not be used because the force from the blast—more powerful than expected—caused the bomber to execute an emergency maneuver away from the site of the detonation. The energy from the blast made the event too dangerous to record on film.

The mushroom cloud began its existence as what Roland Barthes has called a “pure sign,” a visual sign so unfamiliar that it resists assimilation into any existing networks of signification. The pure sign, according to Barthes, is open to “all occasions, all images, and all meanings,” and begs for acculturation through contextualization with other signs and visualities. In the United States, the process of acculturation that the mushroom cloud underwent in the decade following the Trinity test gave rise to what Peter Hales has termed the atomic sublime. The atomic sublime associates the visual signs of nuclear technology with those of natural phenomena, embedding the icons of the bomb within the culture of the grand American West. Hales argues that the atomic sublime serves to downplay the human agency implicit in atomic catastrophes: since nuclear explosions take place on a global scale, and since only natural forces operate at such scales, nuclear explosions can only be natural forces, whose deleterious effects are, for better or worse, out of humanity’s control.

The first images of the atomic bomb that were widely disseminated within the United States made no attempt to place the technology within clear-cut visual paradigms, let alone within established networks of meaning. A photographic essay on the end of the Pacific War in the August 20, 1945 issue of Life magazine reproduced the one aerial image of the Nagasaki mushroom cloud, taken using a smuggled amateur camera by a crew member after the plane made its emergency change of course. Grainy, off-center, and devoid of context, the image does nothing to describe the scale of the sign, let alone the destruction incurred on the ground beneath it.

Fast forward eight years. Alan Jarlson’s photograph of a Nevada family enjoying a nuclear test twenty miles away, printed and reprinted by newspapers across the country and by the National Geographic in 1953, represents the weapon test’s assimilation into a visual network of American domesticity, technological spectatorship, and reverence for the natural world. Jarlson’s composition places the flash of the atomic blast in dialogue with the sky above and the desert floor below. The family members, whose backs are turned to the camera, watch in fascination. Even the family cat takes a look at the atomic spectacle. The “Atomic Dawn,” as the photograph’s caption reads, draws associations between the signs of nuclear technology and the signs of the American West.

Jarlson’s image (and many similar photographs circulated within the United States in the 1950’s and beyond) presents a curated vision of the atomic flash, encoded within signs that suggest a subliminal experience with the natural world: grand open spaces, early light, distant but astonished human observation. Jarlson’s composition draws visual parallels with the grand nineteenth-century paintings of the American West, meant not only to document the country’s unexplored lands but also to present a distinctly optimistic view of mankind’s relationship to the natural world.

Sublime politics

As a visual medium, photography was particularly important for the creation of a sublime atomic visual culture; images of nuclear tests in Nevada (as well as in the distant paradise of Bikini Atoll) could be easily disseminated within newspapers and periodicals. Immediately following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. government circulated photographs of scientists at work on the Manhattan project, seeking to present the development of the atomic bomb as an endeavor no different from any other clean, cutting-edge, and essential scientific project. “Everything’s under control in the control room,” writes Hales. The government also capitalized on the perception of photography as a realistic and indexical medium, a notion articulated most clearly in André Bazin’s Ontology of the Photographic Image some years later. “Photography,” writes Bazin, “enjoys a certain advantage in its transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction.” Photographs cannot be anything but real, so images that present atomic visual icons amongst the signs of the sublime must be recording nothing more than grand, natural, and characteristically non-human events.

The atomic sublime, then, poses a particular challenge for photographers seeking to engage with humankind’s complicity in the development of nuclear technology. Attempts to describe the enormity of the problem using signs and metaphors that evoke planetary scales—an atomic flash as bright as the sun, a mushroom cloud many times taller than Mt. Everest, a radioactive fallout dispersed across the globe—are only contextualized through natural phenomena, evoking the atomic sublime. The atomic sublime, in turn, embeds atomic signs within a distinctly benign, domestic, and American negation of the bomb’s destructive power. According to the atomic visual sublime, the very size of the bomb neutralizes its potential to be man-made. How, then, do photographers engage with the enormity of humanity’s nuclear legacy without acknowledging a reverence for its scale?

Nuclear technology’s challenge to photography

Images like those reproduced in Life in 1945 demonstrate the challenge that nuclear detonations—as photographic subjects—posed to photography; photographer-scientists, however, soon resolved these challenges (and quickly leveraged the mushroom cloud’s status as a unique, iconic, and worthwhile subject for photography). But a different collection of atomic photographs demonstrates a more fundamental, materials-based challenge that nuclear events pose to recording on photographic film. These images seem to avoid neutralization by the atomic sublime. Artist and cultural theorist Susan Schuppli uses the term ‘radical contact prints’ to describe these photographs, whose formal characteristics attest to the physical violence that nuclear catastrophes can inflict on photographic materials. The mechanism underlying the creation of a radical contact print is the intense energy emitted not just by nuclear explosions, but also by such nuclear catastrophes as those at Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, and Fukushima in 2011.

In a radical contact print, according to Schuppli, the heat and radioactivity emitted from the nuclear event violates the barrier between the outside world and the supposedly isolated world of photosensitive materials inside a camera: “Unlike the image of the mushroom cloud, which separates the visual field from the material conditions that it documents, the radiological contact print is immanent to and continuous with the event. By this I mean that the violence out of which the image emerges is directly encoded in the image as the very means by which it comes into the world.” Trinity did give rise to radical contacts between nuclear event and photographic material. The resulting images, beyond being simply overexposed, display black pockmarks on their surface. The pockmarks are not artifacts of the explosion, like calm eyes in the centers of hurricanes; they are instead the direct result of the heat from the explosion burning through photographic film. In these images, the camera lens focuses the heat given off in the first moments of the explosion onto the film, in the same way that a magnifying glass can ignite newspaper on a sunny day. In a cruel twist of process, the physical design of the camera works to destroy the film’s chemical reliability.

Radical contacts have also taken place as a result of civilian nuclear reactor failures. Russian filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko’s Chernobyl: Chronicle of difficult weeks documents the immediate aftermath and initial decontamination efforts after the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown on April 26, 1986. The film was created three days after a steam explosion shattered the radioactive contents of Chernobyl’s Reactor Unit Four and sent them flying into the atmosphere. It concludes with a brief overhead shot of the defunct reactor that Shevchenko recorded through an open window aboard a radiation-shielded helicopter. Upon developing the film from the overhead shot, Shevchenko noticed that it had developed white pockmarks, and that the sound reel of the film contained heavy static. Initially thinking that the film was defective, Shevchenko later realized that he had captured the very effects of radioactivity acting on the film’s surface. High-energy radioisotopes reacted with the light-sensitive chemicals of the film, causing the pockmarks.

The material of the film itself—irradiated to such a degree that it is considered, without exaggeration, to be the “most dangerous film in the world”—continues to exert its distortional effects on the film, adding new pockmarks and changing the sonic profile of the film on a daily basis. Terrifyingly alive, Chronicle of difficult weeks negates the possibility that the visual content of the film is simply an indexical trace of the event it was used to record. Shevchenko’s film is an event as much as it is a representation of an event.

The radical contact print evokes an uncanny closeness to experience, blurring the distinction between representation and event, trace and truth. The “atomic shadows” of human bodies vaporized during the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scorched into the concrete surfaces of the city, suggests that the sheer energy emitted by the bomb circumvents the need for a chemical mediator localized within the photosensitive layer of photographic film. The atomic bomb seems to turn the entire surface of the Earth into a photographic plate.

By breaking down the physical-chemical barrier that underlies the indexicality of photographic processes, radical contact prints resist classification as representations of events or as historical traces. Rather, they constitute events in themselves, direct and dynamic artifacts of interactions between the components of the material world. The visual fidelity of radical contact prints cannot be guaranteed; as with Shevchenko’s film, radiation continually changes the visual content of the object itself. The visual forms contained within radical contact prints, then, cannot be static signs, with fixed meanings and within fixed networks of association.

In subverting static codes of signification in favor of dynamic visual instability, radical contact prints question photography’s ability, as Bazin writes, to transfer the visual form of an object onto a two-dimensional plane in a way that appears closer to “reality” than does drawing or painting. Indeed, radical contact prints question the very identity of signs within atomic imagery, suggesting instead that atomic imagery is a series of ever-changing events that cannot be assimilated into static networks of meaning (or into immortalized narratives that inform such visual cultures as the atomic sublime). From the material-based challenges that nuclear events pose to photography—manifested in the radical contacts between heat and camera, radiation and film, bomb and body—arises the opportunity to explore alternative networks of signification that extend beyond strict visual metaphor. Oppositional visualities emerge: instead of conveying the enormity of humanity’s nuclear legacy through expansive forms and grand landscapes, photographers confront the tremendous scale of nuclear events by convoluting the scales at which they actually occur. Rather than focus on the sky—the site of the mushroom cloud, the medium through which radioactivity disperses and light penetrates (in short, the very home of the atomic sublime)—photographers examine the ground. Negating realism or a rigid arrangement of visual signs to create a closed narrative, photographers emphasize the decontextualization of signs.

Avoiding the sublime: Contemporary photographers

Contemporary artists evoke the atomic bomb’s challenge to photography, as well as the instability of the signs of the atomic sublime, to investigate humanity’s involvement in the global legacy of nuclear technology. Some, such as the Japanese photographer Shimpei Takeda, make use of the photo-active properties of radioactivity to evoke issues of photographic scale and nuclear memory. Others, like the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, work directly with the unstable nature of atomic signs, decontextualizing and recontextualizing them to foreground the fluidity of the meaning they carry.

Shimpei Takeda: Shimpei Takeda uses radioactivity to subvert the traditional processes involved in capturing and developing a photographic image; he notes that, using instant film, he can produce autoradiograms “without having a darkroom, developing trays, or chemicals.” Shimpei’s Trace series, produced between 2012 and 2014 as an attempt to “capture the current state of Japan directly,” makes use of soil contaminated with radiation after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor meltdown in March of 2011. Shimpei collected soil samples from twelve historically and personally significant sites that contain “a strong memory of life and death” located in and around Fukushima prefecture (including shrines, sites of battles, and his own birthplace). He then arranged the soil on photographic plates, auto-exposed them for a month, and developed the plates into prints.

Shimpei is concerned with creating “a physical record of the catastrophe” using soil, a material whose deep connection to the natural world serves as a geologic record of human activity. According to the artist, human-instigated changes in the chemical composition of soil serve as indications that human action is just as influential in changing the material of the Earth as are natural forces themselves. Shimpei casts away all visualities, including that of the atomic sublime, in favor depicting a direct physical experience with the consequences of nuclear disasters through a quasi-photographic process. The Trace series also makes use of the oppositional forces that emerge from the instability of the signs that constitute the atomic sublime—the ground is the primary material of Shimpei’s work, and functions not as a sign among others that is to be connected into a network of meaning, but as the very entity that collapses, in Schuppli’s words, “the gap between representation and the real, form and content, signification and affect.” The visual form of Shimpei’s final products also convolutes scale. The prints’ similarity in appearance to images of star clusters taken by the Hubble Space Telescope draw an eerie parallel between the subatomic but detectable events of radioactive decay and the tremendous scale of nuclear fusion occurring within stars thousands of light-years away.

Cai Guo-Qiang: Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang is well aware of the sublime power of atomic visualities; for him, the atomic bomb led to the most destructive moments in human history, and yet produced “monumental and beautiful” imagery that overshadows the greatest artwork of the twentieth century. Cai’s The century with mushroom clouds: Project for the 20th century (1995-1996) investigates the unresolved power of atomic visualities by emphasizing the instability of atomic visual signs. The project is the first major work that Cai produced after moving permanently to New York City in 1995, through a residency at the Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 Studio Program. In an exercise that he calls “fighting fire with fire,” Cai uses destructive media—such as explosives, gunpowder, and fireworks—to explore resonances and dissonances with historically significant moments of destruction. For The century with mushroom clouds, Cai developed handheld explosives that he detonated at various sites of atomic and ecological significance around the United States, creating miniature mushroom clouds that engage with the landscape in diverse and unpredictable ways.

Cai’s project elaborates on the instability of the mushroom cloud as a sign, using scale to explore the range of meanings that the sign can have beyond its function within the atomic sublime. In the photographs taken from the detonation events of The century with mushroom clouds, scale acts as the radical mediator that confuses event, sign, and visual meaning. Photographic techniques are complicit in Cai’s use of variable scale: although each handheld mushroom cloud is of roughly the same size, Cai strategically places his camera relative to himself and his surroundings to evoke a wide range of imaginary scales. The relative scale of the detonation within each context (from domestically small to monumental) gives rise to a diversity of meanings and emotional responses (from benign indifference to apocalyptic despair). Next to a model house at the Nevada Test Site, the mushroom cloud becomes a puff of cigarette smoke; near Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, it becomes a geyser; in front of the Manhattan skyline, the handheld explosive becomes a terrorist attack. By leveraging the instability of the mushroom cloud as an atomic sign, Cai explores the complex interactions between the mushroom cloud and its many potential contexts. Cai’s work is a reminder that the mushroom cloud does not belong within one particular narrative (for instance, the narrative of the atomic sublime) more than any other.

Read the full essay here.