Atomic War and the Destructive Sublime
This chapter on atomic ruins begins with a discussion of the bomb itself and the iconic form of the mushroom cloud, which quickly emerged from photographs of the explosion. The photography of nuclear war is considered in the work of Japanese photographers like Yamahata and Matsushige, whose horrifying images of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts eventually were shown in the pages of Life magazine after the ban was lifted. Edward Steichen’s celebrated Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art is considered in terms of the image of the hydrogen bomb and its later disappearance from the book version of the show. The post-atomic response of artists like Isozaki is examined, along with American photographers who pictured the Southwest US testing grounds in stunning photographs that explored ways of imaging the unimaginable. How beautiful was the bomb itself? Michael Light’s collection of imagery and related museum exhibitions have shown us the ambiguities of viewing the Destructive Sublime.