It has been suggested that we now inhabit a 'second nuclear age', where radioactive toxicity form... more It has been suggested that we now inhabit a 'second nuclear age', where radioactive toxicity forms a now permanent presence, as a political, psychological and ecological threat. Yet in the aftermath of Cold War depictions of the 'atomic sublime', its visual presence today is rendered problematically banal. Drawing on Robert J. Lifton's studies of the embodied experience of nuclear violence, which stretches the post-traumatic lexicon to include the 'pre-traumatic', this paper aims to address the 'invisibility' of what Robert Nixon has called a contemporary proliferation of 'slow violence'. Focusing on the human interface with the 'nuclear' American West, it investigates anthropological intersections with the art historical literature to explore the potential of documentary photography to make painfully present this interface to an audience beyond its geographical confines. Two photographic series, Carole Gallagher's American Ground Zero and Richard Misrach's Violent Legacies will be analysed through their contrasting uses of the documentary aesthetic to render such violence visible. Their work, situated in the context of the desire to photograph 'new geological forms', which is here taken to characterise the broad history of landscape photography in the American West, sheds light on the unique spatio-temporal properties of 'nuclear trauma'.
It has been suggested that we now inhabit a 'second nuclear age', where radioactive toxicity form... more It has been suggested that we now inhabit a 'second nuclear age', where radioactive toxicity forms a now permanent presence, as a political, psychological and ecological threat. Yet in the aftermath of Cold War depictions of the 'atomic sublime', its visual presence today is rendered problematically banal. Drawing on Robert J. Lifton's studies of the embodied experience of nuclear violence, which stretches the post-traumatic lexicon to include the 'pre-traumatic', this paper aims to address the 'invisibility' of what Robert Nixon has called a contemporary proliferation of 'slow violence'. Focusing on the human interface with the 'nuclear' American West, it investigates anthropological intersections with the art historical literature to explore the potential of documentary photography to make painfully present this interface to an audience beyond its geographical confines. Two photographic series, Carole Gallagher's American Ground Zero and Richard Misrach's Violent Legacies will be analysed through their contrasting uses of the documentary aesthetic to render such violence visible. Their work, situated in the context of the desire to photograph 'new geological forms', which is here taken to characterise the broad history of landscape photography in the American West, sheds light on the unique spatio-temporal properties of 'nuclear trauma'.
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