Through Post-Atomic Eyes
Through Post-Atomic Eyes

Author: Claudette Lauzon

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2022-03-30

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13: 0228013763

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What does it mean to live in a post-atomic world? Photography and contemporary art offer a provocative lens through which to comprehend the by-products of the atomic age, from weapons proliferation, nuclear disaster, and aerial surveillance to toxic waste disposal and climate change. Confronting cultural fallout from the dawn of the nuclear age, Through Post-Atomic Eyes addresses the myriad iterations of nuclear threat and their visual legacy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether in the iconic black-and-white photograph of a mushroom cloud rising over Nagasaki in 1945 or in the steady stream of real-time video documenting the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, atomic culture - and our understanding of it - is inextricably constructed by the visual. This book takes the image as its starting point to address the visual inheritance of atomic anxieties; the intersection of photography, nuclear industries, and military technocultures; and the complex temporality of nuclear technologies. Contemporary artists contribute lens-based works that explore the consequences of the nuclear, and its afterlives, in the Anthropocene. Revealing, through both art and prose, startling new connections between the ongoing threat of nuclear catastrophe and current global crises, Through Post-Atomic Eyes is a richly illustrated examination of how photography shapes and is shaped by nuclear culture.

Art and Nuclear Power
Art and Nuclear Power

Author: Anna Volkmar

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-02-07

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1666900230

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Humanity is struggling with the environmental destruction and social change caused by modern technologies like nuclear reactors. Politicians, scientists, and business leaders all too often revert to a tried and tested set of solutions that fails to grasp the wicked nature of the problem. Eschewing the problem-solving approach that dominates the nuclear energy debate, Anna Volkmar suggests that the only intelligent way to account for the inherent complexity of nuclear technology is not by trying to resolve it but to muddle through it. Through in-depth analyses of contemporary visual art, Volkmar demonstrates how art can suggest ways to muddle through these issues intelligently and ethically. This book is recommended for students and scholars of art history, anthropology, social science, ecocriticism, and philosophy.

The Last Cherry Blossom
The Last Cherry Blossom

Author: Kathleen Burkinshaw

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2016-08-02

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1634506944

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Following the seventieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, this is a new, very personal story to join Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. Yuriko was happy growing up in Hiroshima when it was just her and Papa. But her aunt Kimiko and her cousin Genji are living with them now, and the family is only getting bigger with talk of a double marriage! And while things are changing at home, the world beyond their doors is even more unpredictable. World War II is coming to an end, and since the Japanese newspapers don’t report lost battles, the Japanese people are not entirely certain of where Japan stands. Yuriko is used to the sirens and the air-raid drills, but things start to feel more real when the neighbors who have left to fight stop coming home. When the bombs hit Hiroshima, it’s through Yuriko’s twelve-year-old eyes that we witness the devastation and horror. This is a story that offers young readers insight into how children lived during the war, while also introducing them to Japanese culture. Based loosely on author Kathleen Burkinshaw’s mother’s firsthand experience surviving the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, The Last Cherry Blossom hopes to warn readers of the immense damage nuclear war can bring, while reminding them that the “enemy” in any war is often not so different from ourselves.

The Bomb in the Wilderness
The Bomb in the Wilderness

Author: John O'Brian

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2020-10-01

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0774863900

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What can photographs reveal about Canada’s nuclear footprint? The Bomb in the Wilderness contends that photography is central to how we interpret and remember nuclear activities. The impact and global reach of Canada’s nuclear programs have been felt ever since the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. But do photographs alert viewers to nuclear threat, numb them to its dangers, or actually do both? John O’Brian’s wide-ranging and personal account of the nuclear era presents and discusses over a hundred photographs, ranging from military images to the atomic ephemera of consumer culture. His fascinating analysis ensures that we do not look away.

Toxic Immanence
Toxic Immanence

Author: Livia Monnet

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2022-09-15

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 0228013267

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More than a decade after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, what we are witnessing is not a Second Nuclear Age – there is no post-atomic – but an uncanny, quiet return of the nuclear threat that so vividly animated the Cold War era. The renewed threat of nuclear proliferation, public complacency regarding weapons stockpiles, and the lack of a single functioning long-term repository after seventy years and thousands of tonnes of nuclear waste reveals the industry’s capacity for self-reinvention abetted by an ever-present capacity to forget. More than “fabulously textual,” as Jacques Derrida described it, the protean, unbound, and unending materiality of the nuclear is here to stay: resistance is crucial. Toxic Immanence introduces contemporary interdisciplinary perspectives that resist and decolonize the nuclear. Contributors highlight the prevalence and irrationality of slow violence and colonial governance as elements of the contemporary nuclear age. They propose a reappraisal of Cold War-era anti-nuclear art as well as pop culture representations of nuclear disaster, while decolonizing pedagogies advance the role of education in communicating and understanding the lethality of nuclear complexes. Collectively, the essays develop a robust critical discourse across fields of nuclear knowledge and integrate the work of the nuclear humanities with environmental justice and Indigenous rights activism. This reach across ways of knowing extends artistically: the poetry and photography included in this volume offer visions of past and present nuclear legacies. Conceived as a critical reflection on the potential of nuclear humanities, Toxic Immanence offers intellectual strategies for resisting and abolishing the global nuclear regime.

Invisible Colors
Invisible Colors

Author: Gabrielle Decamous

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2019-02-05

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0262038544

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How art makes visible what had been invisible—the effects of radiation, the lives of atomic bomb survivors, and the politics of the atomic age. The effects of radiation are invisible, but art can make it and its effects visible. Artwork created in response to the events of the nuclear era allow us to see them in a different way. In Invisible Colors, Gabrielle Decamous explores the atomic age from the perspective of the arts, investigating atomic-related art inspired by the work of Marie Curie, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the disaster at Fukushima, and other episodes in nuclear history. Decamous looks at the “Radium Literature” based on the work and life of Marie Curie; “A-Bomb literature” by Hibakusha (bomb survivor) artists from Nagasaki and Hiroshima; responses to the bombings by Western artists and writers; art from the irradiated landscapes of the Cold War—nuclear test sites and uranium mines, mainly in the Pacific and some African nations; and nuclear accidents in Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island. She finds that the artistic voices of the East are often drowned out by those of the West. Hibakusha art and Japanese photographs of the bombing are little known in the West and were censored; poetry from the Marshall Islands and Moruroa is also largely unknown; Western theatrical and cinematic works focus on heroic scientists, military men, and the atomic mushroom cloud rather than the aftermath of the bombings. Emphasizing art by artists who were present at these nuclear events—the “global Hibakusha”—rather than those reacting at a distance, Decamous puts Eastern and Western art in dialogue, analyzing the aesthetics and the ethics of nuclear representation.

Museum Pieces
Museum Pieces

Author: Ruth Bliss Phillips

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 0773539050

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The ways in which Aboriginal people and museums work together have changed drastically in recent decades. This historic process of decolonization, including distinctive attempts to institutionalize multiculturalism, has pushed Canadian museums to pioneer new practices that can accommodate both difference and inclusivity. Ruth Phillips argues that these practices are "indigenous" not only because they originate in Aboriginal activism but because they draw on a distinctively Canadian preference for compromise and tolerance for ambiguity. Phillips dissects seminal exhibitions of Indigenous art to show how changes in display, curatorial voice, and authority stem from broad social, economic, and political forces outside the museum and moves beyond Canadian institutions and practices to discuss historically interrelated developments and exhibitions in the United States, Britain, Australia, and elsewhere. Drawing on forty years of experience as an art historian, curator, exhibition critic, and museum director, she emphasizes the complex and situated nature of the problems that face museums, introducing new perspectives on controversial exhibitions and moments of contestation. A manifesto that calls on us to re-imagine the museum as a place to embrace global interconnectedness, Museum Pieces emphasizes the transformative power of museum controversy and analyses shifting ideas about art, authenticity, and power in the modern museum.

Camera Geologica
Camera Geologica

Author: Siobhan Angus

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2024-02-16

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1478059176

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In Camera Geologica Siobhan Angus tells the history of photography through the minerals upon which the medium depends. Challenging the emphasis on immateriality in discourses on photography, Angus focuses on the inextricable links between image-making and resource extraction, revealing how the mining of bitumen, silver, platinum, iron, uranium, and rare earth elements is a precondition of photography. Photography, Angus contends, begins underground and, in photographs of mines and mining, frequently returns there. Through a materials-driven analysis of visual culture, she illustrates histories of colonization, labor, and environmental degradation to expose the ways in which photography is enmeshed within and enables global extractive capitalism. Angus places nineteenth-century photography in dialogue with digital photography and its own entangled economies of extraction, demonstrating the importance of understanding photography’s complicity in the economic, geopolitical, and social systems that order the world.

Photogenic Montreal
Photogenic Montreal

Author: Martha Langford

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2021-12-15

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 0228009782

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The agency of photographs is a recurrent concern within the context of the city. Whether found in architectural records, social documentary, photojournalism, or artistic practice, photographic objects are embedded in urban contestation, aesthetically charged by artists, reinserted into social histories, and mobilized to imagine a future city. Photogenic Montreal takes a question initially posed by heritage debates – what does photography preserve? – and creates a rich conversation about the agency of the human actors before and behind the camera, and of the medium itself. The interplay of archives and activisms structures the book. Photographs that appear to be sealed off in newspapers, storage rooms, or archives accrue new meaning when they cross the threshold back into social spaces and circulate anew. It is through the reactivation of archival photographs that submerged traces of urban experience are discovered, and alternate histories of Montreal can be recounted. Multiple forms of activism and artistic expression complement this archival work. Beginning in the 1960s, community-minded and heritage groups responded to the tensions arising from urban reconstruction, gentrification, and the erasure of neighbourhoods; this activism also left its photographic traces. Attentive to the still-changing face of the city’s architecture, neighbourhoods, and street life, Photogenic Montreal participates in debates about who the city belongs to, who speaks on its behalf, and how to picture its past and present.

Place Matters
Place Matters

Author: Jonathan Bordo

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2022-12-15

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0228014859

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A place comes into existence through the depth of relationships that underwrite a physical location with layers of sedimented names. In Place Matters scholars and artists conduct varied forms of place-based inquiry to demonstrate why place matters. Lavishly illustrated, the volume brings into conversation photographic projects and essays that revitalize the study of landscape. Contributors engage the study of place through an approach that Jonathan Bordo and Blake Fitzpatrick call critical topography: the way that we understand critical thought to range over a place, or how thought and symbolic forms invent place through text and image as if initiated by an X marking the spot. Critical topography’s tasks are to mediate and to diminish the gap between representation and referent, to be both in the world and about the world; to ask what place is this, what are its names, where am I, how and with what responsibilities may I be here? Chapters map the deep cultural, environmental, and political histories of singular places, interrogating the charged relation between history, place, and power and identifying the territorial imperatives of place making in such sites as Colonus, Mont Sainte-Victoire, Chomolungma/Everest, Hiroshima, Fort Qu’Appelle, Donetsk airport, and the island of Lesbos. With contributions from the renowned artists Hamish Fulton and Edward Burtynsky, the Swedish poet Jesper Svenbro, and others, the collection examines profound shifts in place-based thinking as it relates to the history of art, the anthropocene and nuclear ruin, borders and global migration, residential schools, the pandemic, and sites of refuge. In his prologue W.J.T. Mitchell writes: “Places, like feasts, are moveable. They can be erased and forgotten, lost in space, or maintained and rebuilt. Both their appearance and disappearance, their making and unmaking, are the work of critical topography.” Global in scope, Canadian in spirit, and grounded in singular sites, Place Matters presents critical topography as an approach to analyze, interpret, and reflect on place.