RADICAL CONTACTS

Photographs as Events

A particular body of photographic work seems to evade neutralization by the atomic sublime. Extant since the first few microseconds after Trinity’s detonation, these photographs demonstrate the challenge that nuclear events—be they bomb detonations or major catastrophes of civilian nuclear reactors—pose to recording on photographic film. The formal characteristics of these radical contact prints attest to the physical violence of nuclear catastrophes.

The pockmarks in the images above 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 effectively focuses the heat given off in the first moments of the explosion onto the film, in the same way that a magnifying glass can light newspaper on fire on a sunny day. In a cruel twist of process, the physical design of the camera works to literally 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 disaster occurred on April 26, 1986. Created three days after the explosion and meltdown Reactor Unit 4, the film contains a brief overhead shot (at the very end of the film) of the nuclear reactor that Shevchenko recorded through an open window aboard a radiation-shielded helicopter. Upon developing the film, Shevchenko noticed that the film had developed pockmarks similar to those of the burned Trinity images, and that the sound reel of the film contained heavy static. Initially thinking that the film was defective, Shevchenko realized that he had captured the very effects of radioactivity acting on the film’s surface. Radioactive particles interacted 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 an indexical trace, supplanting instead the reality that the film’s material interacts directly with the material content of the world at large.

Radical contacts are not limited to images of extreme nuclear events; in fact, they were instrumental to the discovery of radioactivity itself. In 1896, Henri Becquerel, a Parisian scientist, was investigating the action of naturally fluorescent minerals on photographic plates, believing that uranium salts, upon exposure to sunlight, could convert light into x-rays that could penetrate through paper and onto the photographic plate. In February, an overcast winter day forced him to put away his materials in a dark drawer. For reasons unknown, Becquerel decided to develop these plates anyway; to his surprise, the plates showed a clear imprint in the shape of his uranium salt sample. From its first moments as a known scientific phenomenon, radioactivity has had an intimate and essential relationship with photography.

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 and of 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.