After and Before: Documenting the A-bomb
Roth Horowitz Gallery
January 9-February 22, 2003

After and Before: Documenting the A-bomb
by James Elkins and Hilton Als
PPP Editions, 2003

After and Before: Documenting the A-bomb, an exhibition now on display at Roth Horowitz Gallery in Manhattan, juxtaposes two groups of photos. One group, made by the young Harold Edgerton sometime after 1951, shows the first microseconds of atomic test explosions on Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The other, the work of an anonymous photographer believed to be a U.S. naval officer, was made in Hiroshima in the weeks after August 6, 1945.

The images of Hiroshima, some 400 four-by-six prints, cover three walls of the gallery from knee- to eye-level. Like their author, the circumstances of the photographs are unknown. They were found abandoned in a suitcase in a derelict building in Massachusetts several years ago, with no hints as to their history beyond what the photos themselves reveal.

The photographs' purpose is clearly forensic. They are marked on back with notes on where they were taken, the direction the camera faced at the time of exposure, and other details. "Looking South, 5700 feet from Ground Zero;" "Looking North East, showing cedar bark shingles on dwelling ignited by Bomb Flash;" "Building, School: Shows 12 inch concrete fire wall with non-automatic steel roll shutters." In some, an arrow marked "Direction of Blast" is chalked on the ground in the front of the frame.

While the photos were originally intended to record specific consequences of the blast—an aid, perhaps, to future bombmakers and generals—the features that are common to the group as a whole are what make them most memorable. An A-bomb, at least of the now unimpressive sort dropped on Hiroshima, does peculiar things to a city. It reduces buildings to exterior walls, their roofs, interiors, and ornamentation erased by the blast. Trees become trunks, stripped of branches and leaves. City blocks are leveled with the streets bisecting them. And everywhere there is rubble—not the sick, chalky ash familiar from downtown Manhattan but the sturdiest remnants of a city carved at the joints: chunks of concrete, gears, tires, half a staircase. In a small cemetery, the Chugoku Mountains in the background, a once straight row of tombstones looks like a mouth of rotten teeth. By an unfathomable causal chain, some stones stand straight and unaffected by the blast while others, interspersed among the standing, lie fallen or reduced to dust.

Across from the Hiroshima photos are Harold Edgerton's images of nuclear test explosions. The photos, taken seven miles away from the blast site, look like telescopic images of far-off stars. Centered in the picture is a sphere of light or puff of gas; waves of light, clouds, and comet-like forms radiate out from it. Like images of stars, the photos of the nuclear tests foreshorten their subject, compressing and flattening its extraordinary power and size. Here is the familiar abstraction of pictures of space, the sense that if it were not for telltale signs of photographic authenticity—the grain of the high-speed film necessary to capture .006 seconds of explosion, cracks in a 50-year-old print, a fingerprint on a negative—one might be looking at a kaleidoscope, a fractal pattern, or a freeze frame from a particularly clever computer screensaver. Only on close examination do more recognizable forms appear: a radio tower, a line of (short-lived) Joshua trees, a cloud of displaced earth rushing towards the lens. In the exhibition catalogue, which reproduces four of the Edgerton images, James Elkins writes, "If the Joshua trees are ten feet high, then the explosion is three or four hundred feet tall, and if it is a sphere it is already sixteen million cubic feet of—of what?"

Edgerton is best known as a pioneer of stroboscopic stop-motion photography. His pictures of bullets shooting through apples, milkdrop coronets, and athletes frozen midair are iconic. Here, he displays his particular ability, a mix of engineering acumen with an eye for drama, the eye literally and figuratively focused on darker subject matter. Edgerton's work on the A-bomb was not limited to the role of photographic observer. Among other things, his company EG&G manufactured triggers for the early bomb and provided the official countdown recording for subsequent nuclear tests. Like the anonymous photographs of Hiroshima, Edgerton's images of the A-bomb were created with an instrumental purpose. From abstract images of the explosion—the distant star, or subatomic particle, or any of a thousand metaphors—he helped figure the mechanics of the atomic blast. These images, so fresh and bewildering as objects of art, are data to the general and bombmaker.

Both the images of the test explosions and those of Hiroshima are arresting not because of what is in them but because of what they do not show, because of (to use the Kantian term) their conditions of possibility. These photos, that is, are not so much evidence as metaphysical objects. In Edgerton's, the minds and science behind the blast are the photographs' invisible subjects. In the photos of Hiroshima, the invisible subject is a living city.

David Noll is a partner at Public Digital, a design firm in New York.

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