Harlem (1962), 1.2 Mt. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
What makes a photograph a photograph?
What is photography? One simple definition is that photography is the science and art of recording electromagnetic radiation—light—on some light-sensitive medium (such as an electronic image sensor or photographic film). Photographic machines record the three-dimensional distribution of electromagnetic radiation onto a two-dimensional plane. Photography is also time-dependent, recording only the electromagnetic distribution of a particular place at a particular time on each image. There exists a period of latency between the act of taking a photograph—of exposing light-sensitive material for some time—and the act of experiencing the photograph, since the light-sensitive material’s reaction to the light needs to be processed, printed, developed.
The radical contact print eliminates the latency between recording and experience—heat released from a nuclear test that burns through film immediately serves as a manifestation of the electromagnetic power released by such an event. The photographic material becomes an artifact of the event, not a recording of it.
Radioactivity also turns the body into a camera, capable of recording electromagnetic activity and manifesting the encounter after some latency period. At the levels experienced by most scientists, civilians, and victims who witnessed a nuclear detonation, radioactivity does not immediately have effects on the body. It can take minutes, days, years, or even decades before the effects of radiation exposure make themselves known. But, inevitably, radiation scars appearing on the skin point to an encounter with a concentrated source of radioactivity. The vocabulary that doctors use to describe the pathologies of radiation exposure underscore the parallels between the camera as a camera and the body as a camera—radiation exposure “develops” into cancer, just as exposed film develops into an image worth looking at.
The sheer energy that an atomic bomb releases force all materials—whether a body or a tree or a swingset—into a camera. The traces left by a nuclear detonation blur the distinction between representation and event, symbol and truth. The “atomic shadows” of human bodies vaporized during the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scorched into the concrete surfaces of the city, demonstrate that the energy emitted by the bomb circumvents the need for a chemical or electronic mediator localized within the photosensitive layer of photographic film. Tragically, the atomic bomb turns the entire surface of the Earth into a photographic plate.
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