The Piercing Punctum of Radioactive Photographs
Written by Lily-Cannelle Mathieu
Edited by Alena Russell and Kennedy Randall
Introduction
In this article, I analyze the work of four contemporary artists who have used the medium of photography to capture –and, as I will argue, release– radioactivity. These artists –Jeremy Bolen, Abbey Hepner, Yoi Kawakubo, and Shimpei Takeda– have all addressed, in their artistic practice, the insidious issue of radioactivity, which emanates from the landscapes of their respective homelands. By reinventing photographic ways to look at and sense the soil and landscapes of a post-3.11 Fukushima and of (post-)Cold War uranium mining and nuclear waste sites in the United States of America, these artists have materialized an imperceptible radioactive threat; they have proposed a powerful mediatic alternative to a strictly visual rendering of information about nuclear landscapes. Prior to exposing my argumentative strategy for substantiating such claims, I outline a brief history of nuclear atrocities in Japan and the United States and present the artworks selected as case studies.
A brief history of nuclear atrocities in Japan and the United States
Following the famous atomic ending of the Second World War,, Americans occupied Japan and ensured their cultural and political influence over the country. Followingly, Eisenhower’s 1953 Atoms for Peace Program, which aimed at shifting negative attitudes toward the dropping of the atomic bombs into a positive perception of nuclear energy, provided Japan with money, training, and cultural propaganda for it to build its own nuclear industry.[3] This nuclear program proved to be effective: nuclear energy became a national strategic priority of Japan in 1973, and up until 2011, 30% of the country’s electricity was generated by its nuclear reactors.[4]
However, this enthusiasm faltered in March 2011, when the “Great Tohoku Earthquake'' and its co-occurring tsunami ignited the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant meltdown. The triple catastrophe caused the displacement of 80,000 residents, destroyed or damaged 1.2 million buildings, and caused the death of more than 15,000 individuals.[5] The material, economic and psychological impacts of this disaster were so expansive that scholar Mikuriya Takashi identified “3-11” (March 2011) as the start of a new era in Japan – saigō (‘after the catastrophe’)–.[6] Japanese authorities have consistently minimized hazards associated with atomic weapons and nuclear energy[8] and failed to provide timely information to the public about the release of nuclear radiation after the accident.[9] The Japanese population’s trust is, furthermore, constantly being tested by its government, which has set the level of permissible radiation quite high so as to create an illusion of safety, and which claims that nuclear energy is indispensable to the country’s economy.[10]
As for the United States, its 1945 nuclear attacks on Japan and its “Cold” confrontations with the USSR are deeply entrenched in History as defining ‘events’ of the 20th century, but the American country’s intra-national nuclear legacy is much less historicized – if not even hidden from public scrutiny in anauthoritarian motion comparable to that of Japan.[11] Anthropologist Joseph Masco points at the near erasure of the American nuclear economy from the public view and presents the country’s “nuclear borderlands” as repressed spaces within nuclear modernism.[12] The scholar claims that in the United States, where 942 nuclear detonations were conducted between 1940 and 1956,[13] the technological infrastructure of the Second World War and of the Cold War lives on.[14] Atomic weapons test sites, uranium mining sites, plutonium production industries, and radioactive waste sites, indeed, remain dangerously “alive” all over the country. While both Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents who lived near test sites were regularly assured that nuclear fallout would bypass their towns and settlements in the 1940s and 1950s,[15] and while health hazards stemming from the nuclear industry (one of the largest industrial enterprises in history[16]) continue to be minimized throughout the United States,[17] most –if not all– American (and other Terran) bodies contain some level of radioactive toxins inherited from more than seven decades of nuclear industrial operations and weapon testing in the United States (and all over the world).[18]
Jeremy Bolen’s radioactive photography
Jeremy Bolen (b. 1977), a Chicago-based contemporary artist, has been documenting American radioactive landscapes since 2012 in diverse photographic series, often juxtaposing different representations of a same site in a single artwork in an effort to create documents displaying the moment of image-creation and the environment contributing to its conception.[19] In an interview with art critic Caroline Picard, the artist stated that, in his projects, he creates “a tension between the familiar representation, the invisible, and the actual.”[20] Bolen’s signature work, in fact, complements the representational work of standard landscape photographs of uranium mining sites or nuclear waste dumping grounds with cameraless photographs (“radiograms”) made from film buried in the radioactive terrain of these very landscapes and with (radioactive) bits of dirt taken from the same locations (figs. 1-3).
Fig. 1. Jeremy Bolen, Hot Spots: Radioactivity and the Landscape, undated (c. 2016). Mixed media: landscape photograph, dirt, and print made from film buried in radioactive earth in Jackpile Mine, New Mexico. Unknown dimensions.
Jackpile Mine is an abandoned uranium mining site that was operative from 1952 to 1982. It is on the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priorities List for cleanup.[95]
Fig. 2. Jeremy Bolen, Jackpile Mine 4, 2016. Mixed media: landscape photograph, dirt, and print made from film buried in radioactive earth in Jackpile Mine, New Mexico. Unknown dimensions.
Fig. 3. Jeremy Bolen, Site A Excavations, 2013. Mixed media: dirt and print made from film buried in radioactive earth in Argonne, Illinois. Unknown dimensions.
The Argonne National Laboratory, which was born out of the University of Chicago’s work on the Manhattan project in the 1940s, is a multidisciplinary science and engineering center.[96] Site A was the first nuclear dumping ground in the United States after an early nuclear reactor was built on site in 1943.[97]
While the colors and shapes of the traditional landscape photographs, in their mimetic quality, satisfactorily respond to viewers’ expectations, the radiograms are as dissonant as screeching violins in their unresolved tonalities and chromatic irregularities (fig. 2) and deeply unsettling in their formlessness.[21] The juxtaposition of the traditional landscape photographs to the ambiguously textured and alien-looking radiograms is disquieting, and the formally abstract radiograms, upon a second look informed by secondary information concerning the radioactivity of the soil they represent, [22] come to seem to bear the scars of a suffering earth. Yet, it is perhaps the integration of bits of soil, which fully materialize the radioactive quality of Bolen’s artworks, that is most upsetting and threatening in its reference to the “unresolved energy that remains long after knowledge production pursuits conclude.”[23]
Abbey Hepner’s radioactive photography
Abbey Hepner (unknown birth date), an American artist based in New Mexico, U.S.A., started to engage with radioactivity in her photographic work in 2011, after volunteering in Fukushima’s devastated landscapes following the nuclear meltdown.[24] Her Transuranic series (2014)(figs. 4-5) consists of a series of thirteen landscape photographs depicting all the sites in Western United States that ship radioactive waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
Fig. 4. Abbey Hepner, Hanford Washington, Transuranic series, 2014. Uranotype photograph, 9” x 13”.
In Hanford and in its adjacent Columbia generating station, radioactive waste is buried and activities of research and development of radioactive waste management technologies are pursued.[98]
Fig. 5. Abbey Hepner, Columbia Generating Station, Hanford Washington, Transuranic series, 2014. Uranotype photograph, 9” x 13”.
The peculiarity of these seemingly banal landscape photographs is the antiquated and dangerous printing process that Hepner employed to produce them, which consisted of spreading a solution of uranyl nitrate (from the photosensitive metal salt uranyl nitrate, a material derived from uranium[25]) rather than silver nitrate on the paper on which the photographs were to be developed.[26] The uranyl nitrate, in addition to conferring to the photographs an uncanny orange tonal stillness allegedly similar to the tint of Hiroshima’s sky after the explosion of the bomb,[27] renders the photographs slightly radioactive: the artworks visually referencing the irradiating sites are radioactive themselves.[28] Here, Hepner’s claim that her artworks “always live in and through a corporeally-sensitive approach to the photographic medium”[29] takes all its sense. Further, it is interesting to note that when the Transuranic series is exhibited, two Geiger counters (devices detecting and measuring ionizing radiation), one dating from the Cold War era and one being a post-Fukushima consumer hand device, constantly and audibly measure the radiation emanating from the photographs (fig. 6).[30] The photographs’ slow release of radioactive energy is material, and this materiality, this energy’s encounter with the gallery visitors’ bodies, can be heard: tik – tik – tik.
Fig. 6. Abbey Hepner, Detail from installation, Transuranic series, 2014. Uranotype photograph and Geiger counters.
Yoi Kawakubo’s radioactive photography
Yoi Kawakubo (b. 1979), a Japanese artist born in Spain and currently based in London and Tokyo, has addressed the issue of radioactivity in Japan in different photographic and filmic works. In this paper, I discuss his If the Radiance of a Thousand Suns Were to Burst at Once into the Skies series (2014-2019)(figs. 7-9), on which he has been working since 2014. The photographs of this series, which are formally abstract, are cameraless photographs that were produced by burying unexposed photosensitive papers in the soil of Fukushima’s evacuation zone and retrieving them after a few months.
Fig. 7. Yoi Kawabuko, If the Radiance of a Thousand Suns Were to Burst At Once Into the Skies I, 2014. Unexposed photosensitive paper buried under soil in Fukushima’s evacuation zone. Unknown dimensions.
Fig. 8. Yoi Kawabuko, If the Radiance of a Thousand Suns Were to Burst At Once Into the Skies V, 2019. Unexposed photosensitive paper buried under soil in Fukushima’s evacuation zone. Unknown dimensions.
Fig. 9. Yoi Kawabuko, If the Radiance of a Thousand Suns Were to Burst At Once Into the Skies IV, 2019. Unexposed photosensitive paper buried under soil in Fukushima’s evacuation zone. Unknown dimensions.
These cameraless photographs are products of the soil’s radioactive radiance rather than that of the sun’s. This processual quality of the photographs’ production is hinted at by the series’ title, which refers to a claim made by American physicist Robert Oppenheimer –leader of the Manhattan project, the “father” of the atomic bomb–[31] in a speech he dedicated to the atomic bomb: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the skies, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One.”[32] From this radioactive radiance resulted abstract photographs exhibiting different formal qualities, ranging from Rothko-like poisonous-looking mists (fig. 7) to odd, oxidized-like textures evoking Nicolas Lachance’s artworks, superposed to unresolved, nauseating tonal plays (figs. 8, 9) . With this uncanny series of materially realistic photographs, Kawakubo enacts a refusal to represent the radioactive landscape through standard photographic practice; he invents a new form of looking that exceeds the visual and that links beholders sensorially, through proximity with the exposed photographic paper, to radioactivity.
Shimpei Takeda’s radioactive photography
Shimpei Takeda (b. 1982) often experiments with cameraless photographic processes in his art. The Japanese artist predominantly works with photographs capturing the chemical activity of melting snow, salt, and radioactive soil on paper. In 2012, one year after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown, Takeda went to Fukushima prefecture, where he had spent his youth with his family,[33] to collect contaminated soil samples from twelve locations across the region where people still lived and worked[34] and placed the sixteen samples against photo-sensitive material in light-tight containers for a month.[35] The resulting photographs, forming his Traces series (2012)(figs 10, 11), are abstract-looking black rectangles punctuated with hazy white spots. The white traces, which vary in intensity among the different photographs, are indexical manifestations of radioactivity, materialized representations of a presence that is all too invisible. Art historian and curator Geoffrey Batchen notes that Takeda’s autoradiograms “may look abstract but in some way, they are the most realist type of photography. Here the world of nature gets to represent itself as itself, without any mediation with a camera. […] It’s just radioactivity leaving its image on the paper.”[36] This unmediated radioactivity is startling in its formal imbalance, which terrifyingly reveals the unpredictability of the effects of radiation. However, like the artworks produced by Bolen, Hepner, and Kawakubo, Taken’s autoradiograms are not solely uncanny in their formal qualities: they, too, having been exposed to radioactive soil samples, emit a light radiation affecting, if slightly, beholders’ bodies.
Fig. 10. Shimpei Takeda, Trace #1, Kegon Falls, 2012. Print made from photo-sensitive material exposed to contaminated soil in light-tight container. Unknown dimensions.
Fig. 11. Shimpei Takeda, Trace #16, Lake Hayama (Mano Dam), 2012. Print made from photo-sensitive material exposed to contaminated soil in light-tight container. Unknown dimensions.
Thesis and argumentative structure
The artworks produced by the four aforementioned artists are not only about radioactivity: they materialize the very radioactivity they are referring to. They have all captured, and slowly release, radiation. Although their level of radioactivity is too low to seriously harm an audience standing in their proximity, the radiation they emit is, I believe, significant at the affective level.
The thesis of this paper is that materialized information, such as that which is vibrating in these contemporary photographs capturing and releasing radiation, is a powerful mediatic alternative to a strictly visual rendering of information. Radioactive photographs, in fact, have the potential to cause affective, embodied responses in beholders by disturbing their bodily integrity, the material frontier of their very being.
First, (I) I explain how the selected artworks exceed visuality. This explanation starts with (a) an analysis of how these photographs overcome and offer an alternative to the typical visual strategies employed to address nuclear threats and of how they resist authoritarian nuclearist visualities. Followingly, (b) I describe how the artworks, as new forms of information, are materialized countervisualities claiming a Mirzoeffian “right to look,”[37] and, as such, revolutionize and redistribute the sensible. Second, (II) I theorize these artworks’ strategy as one wherein radioactivity is released to provoke embodied responses. To substantiate this idea, I (a) discuss the photographs’ release of radioactivity as a Barthesian punctum,[38] (b) analyze this radioactive punctum as disturbing the bodily integrity of viewers, and finally, (c) interpret the ensuing response as embodied and affective.
I – Exceeding visualities
(a) Nuclear visualities
An alternative to typical visual strategies addressing nuclear threat
Fig. 12. U.S. Air Force, Mushroom Cloud Over Nagasaki, 1945. Analog photograph.
Nuclear threats have been a significant source of worldly social anxiety since 1945, an anxiety that gained significant momentum during the Cold War confrontations between the United States and the USSR, after the 1986 nuclear incident in Chernobyl, and after the 2011 nuclear meltdown in Fukushima.. This social anxiety and the headline-worthiness of these events have brought about the creation of myriads of images representing and addressing nuclear threats, a majority of which employ either nuclear iconography or catastrophe imagery as visual strategy.
Nuclear iconography is a visual strategy that was epitomized, in the second half of the 20th century, by pictures of the mushroom cloud taken kilometers away from the bomb’s hypocenter – a position from which the “mushroomy” outline of the cloud is made visible and from which the atrocities happening at the mushroom’s foot are not perceivable (fig. 12).[39] Such photographs, which were regularly published in popular media like Life magazine during the years of the Cold War,[40] made the mushroom cloud instantly recognizable, a new staple of mass media and popular culture.[41] The image of the cloud (as a singularized phenomenon) became an icon of technogenic prowess (rather than disaster),[42] worked alongside censorship and the limiting of circulation of the most horrific images taken at the mushroom’s foot by displacing and hiding the atrocity of the bomb’s actual use, by limiting what the public could see and imagine.[43]
Fig. 13. Chim : Pom/Kota Takeuchi, Finger Pointing Worker, 2011. Still from CCTV television service on Fukushima clean-up.
A contemporary version of the visual strategy of nuclear iconography is that of decontamination workers or ‘dark tourists’ conspicuously wearing full-body anti-radiation suits –often white, evoking a scientist’s robe and (cynically) referring to scientific prowess– in radioactive evacuation-exclusion zones. The famous video performance and resulting still image (fig. 13) of Chim : Pom artist Kota Takeuchi, dressed in a white anti-radiation suit, pointing directly at viewers through the CCTV camera that was filming decontamination work in Fukushima’s exclusion zone in 2011, exemplifies this contemporary version of nuclear iconography. While contemporary nuclear iconographic images with radiation suit-wearing protagonists are taken near a nuclear disaster’s hypocenter –as opposed to pictures of mushroom clouds– they maintain nuclear iconography’s symbolic vocabulary.[44] They maintain the photographic “atomic language,” which consists of non-horrific, technoscientific visual elements referring to nuclear incidents through a naturalistic (an illusion of transparent and complete true-to-life representation created by the medium of photography)[45] symbolism (in which few visual elements are synecdochally taken to represent a whole event) shielding viewers from direct visual exposure to nuclear atrocities.
Such direct visual exposure to nuclear atrocities is harnessed by the second typical visual strategy addressing nuclear threat, catastrophe imagery. Photographs using this strategy are violent: they have their viewers witness explosions, burnt corpses, bleeding tongues (fig. 14), collapsing buildings. They respond to the press’ desire for “photographic effect,” for brutal imagery accentuating tragedy and fear to shock viewers in order to grasp their attention in the “ultra-fast, highly competitive environment'' that has taken hold of the media.[46] Sontag describes this familiar and “celebrated” image of agony, of ruin, as an “unavoidable feature” of our camera-mediated knowledge of war and disaster,[47] and Geilhorn confirms that the 3.11 Fukushima disaster triggered a tsunami of catastrophe imagery in the news and on social media.[48] One problem, within the many issues concerning this visual strategy, is that a photograph’s representational power can quickly harden the atrocious image into a stereotype.[49]
Fig. 14. Unidentified photographer, Soldier bleeding from the tongue, 1945. Analog photograph. Shogo Nagaoka Collection, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
The artworks I have selected as case studies offer an alternative to those two visual strategies –nuclear iconography and catastrophe imagery. In their formal abstraction, in their obstinate refusal “to give us the pictorial resolution we crave,”[50] Bolen, Kawakubo and Takeda’s radiograms straightforwardly reject the iconographic strategy and annihilate any possibility to represent catastrophe brutally. In their mimetic representation of what seem to be harmless American landscapes, Bolen and Hepner’s photographs distinctly avoid any use of iconographic reference to nuclear threat and dismiss catastrophic visual language. All such artworks deny primary explanatory information to their viewers, and, in negating iconographic and catastrophic representations of atrocity, “immerse us in a visual experience that is at once calm and implacable, empty of “content” but all the more powerful for it.”[51] These photographs, in opposition to typical nuclear imagery, are visually discreet –as pictures of subjects “closer to home” are expected to be– [52] and there lies their formal power.
Resisting authoritarian nuclearist visualities
In addition to overcoming the typical visual strategies used to address nuclear threats, the photographs selected as case-studies resist authoritarian nuclearist[53] visualities. As expounded previously, the governments of Japan and the United States have been enacting a somewhat authoritarian management of their nuclear industry since the dawn of that industry in the 1950s and up to the present day. They have done so by propagandizing nuclear energy as indispensable to their national economy, by enforcing illusions of safety in their economically-driven discourses, by minimizing the health hazards of nuclear landscapes, and by repressing such landscapes and hiding them from public scrutiny. These two states, which I define as “nuclearist” by stretching the definition of the adjective for it to encompass not only nations advocating for their possession of nuclear weapons, but nations possessing nuclear plants and advocating for the importance of this source of energy for their country, are, in this sense, enacting an ideology of authoritarian nuclearism.
The authoritarian nuclearist project has Japan and the United states “hiding” or forbidding access to nuclear landscapes, keeping radioactivity invisible, and creating an illusion of containment and transparency. The two countries, thus, perform a specific ideology of the visible[54] which consists of keeping danger and threat invisible. In Mirzoeffian terms, Japan and the United States have been enacting an “authority of visuality,” wherein the states ‘control’ visuality[55] to erase one of their tools of power, the nuclear economy, from public view. If we were to imagine such control of visuality sensorially, we could use as a metaphor to this authoritarian visuality the flashblindness created by the visual intensity of a nuclear explosion, which readily blinds by its brilliance:[56] the nuclearist states, to blind their citizens, deaden their senses and mute protest, emit nuclear flashes fueled by a secretive control of information and mild propaganda.
The artworks under analysis, I argue, resist such “flashblinding” authoritarian nuclearist visualities. Not only do the four artists frown at their government’s secretive nuclearism by entering in non-access exclusion zones; they also photograph the hidden landscapes or – even worse – dig in these sites’ soil to bury photosensitive media and materially capture the radioactivity that the governments are painfully attempting to minimize. The states’ project of nuclearist visuality aims at keeping radioactivity invisible, an objective that is undermined by these artworks’ very formal qualities –white stains, patterns of seeming oxidation, chromatic instability, formless scars, orange-ish uranium-derived tints… Additionally, the artists sustain the photographic civil duty theorized by Azoulay in refusing to subordinate their image-production to governmental nuclearist ideology and in opening up this civic activity to the photographs’ viewers, by allowing the public to join in their soft insubordination.[57]
The selected artworks, thus, exceed visuality in overcoming typical nuclear visual strategies and in resisting authoritarian nuclearist visualities.
(b) Material excesses
New forms of information
The artworks produced by Jeremy Bolen, Abbey Hepner, Yoi Kawakubo and Shimpei Takeda, when viewed in conjunction with a reading of the secondary information the artists provide either as title, accompanying Geiger counters, or information panels with detailed quantitative data about the radioactive levels of the soils in which the radiograms were produced, are extremely informative. Yet their informative quality is not typical, not semantic nor bureaucratic: their informative quality is in-formed, ‘put into form’ as the Latin root of the word ‘information’ would have it.[58] The information they provide to viewers has a plastic shape and is inseparable from its form.[59] This means that, as ‘formed’ documents, these photographs have an important phenomenological quality, a physical presence and a specificity that stems from their very substance.[60] Further, due to their peculiar production processes involving physical contact with uranyl nitrate or radioactive soil, they are even more ‘formed’: they are “rubbed with real.”[61]
Materialized countervisualities
It is their very form, the very importance of their materiality, that frees these photographs from what Batchen describes as the “traditional subservient role [of photography] as a realist mode of representation” and that allows them to become, as the art historian and curator would identify them, “an art of the real,”[62] really realistic photographs gaining their realism from their quality of being “rubbed with real” – rubbed with radioactivity.
These materialized photographs produce a ‘form’ of realism that stands in opposition to the mimetic and iconic depictions formulated by typical photographs attending to nuclear threat and in opposition to the authoritarian nuclearist visuality (an authoritarian visuality of invisibility, of countenance) described previously. The photographs I selected as case-studies are thus, in Mirzoeffian terms, counter-visualities. They stand in dissensus with visuality, and, in their refusal to keep on segregating nuclear landscapes and radioactivity from public scrutiny, spontaneously invent new forms, new formal compositions playing with formless presences and uncanny chromaticities.[63] The different and new kind of realism they employ let the world and the earth communicate with viewers “directly, transitively, really – as an emanation of that world, rather than its [cherry-picked] copy”[64] and courageously collapse the boundary between visibility and invisibility that is continuously being enforced by the nuclearist states. These photographs, thus, dispute visualities and claim a right to the real, a “right to look,” a right to visibility.[65]
A redistribution of the sensible
Bolen, Hepner, Kawakubo and Takeda, by proposing materialized countervisualities with original ‘really realistic’ forms, suspend ordinary sensible experience; they revolutionize the sensible. The artworks discussed in this article, I argue, disturb and displace our perception, which does not typically allow us humans to grasp radioactivity sensorially. These artworks, in fact, induce what Jacques Rancière describes as a “redistribution of the sensible,” a reframing of subjectivities and perception that makes art qua art political in its constant remodeling of sensibilities.[66]
Considering that radioactivity is a force that radicalizes matter and that transforms all that it comes into contact with,[67] it seems quite à propos that artworks working with radioactivity as both subject matter and mediatic component bring about such a redistribution –a re-form– of the sensible experience. The artworks under analysis manage to challenge and displace the naturalized categories of sensibilities[68] that normally forbid us from seeing and sensing radioactivity: in their material phenomenology, by their very existence as “traces'' of radioactivity, they revolutionize sensible experiences and viewers’ capacity to inhabit the world sensorially.[69] “The camera sees beyond the physical and the cultural limitations of sight,” writes Shawn Michelle Smith,[70] and I believe that my case-studies perceptibly overcome such physical and cultural limitations of sight that are imposed by the current distribution of the sensible enforced by nuclearist states.
The photographs I analyze in this essay are, in brief, not only (a) overcoming nuclear visualities: (b) they are also excessively material and, as such, redistribute the sensible.
II – Released radioactivity: embodied responses
(a) Release; attack; punctum
Roland Barthes, in his book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, famously devised two elements one can perceive and experience when looking at photographs: the studium and the punctum. The studium, often the central subject of a photograph, is experienced as a sort of inert background (“un espace très habituellement unaire”[71]) that is overshadowed by the photograph’s punctum, an alluring detail (which can fill the whole photograph[72]) that pricks (from the verb “poindre”) the viewer. In Barthes’ narrative, the punctum shatters the phenomenological experience of a viewer who was politely and somewhat disinterestedly investing his or her consciousness into the photograph’s studium: once it has met the viewer’s eyes, the punctum comes out of the photograph, like an arrow, to pierce –to prick, to bruise– the viewer.[73] Barthes, in fact, employs an analogy of attack in describing the punctum as a wound, “une blessure.”[74]
Let us remind ourselves, for a moment, that the artworks I am analyzing in this essay are all slightly radioactive: Bolen’s pieces contain radioactive bits of soil, the uranyl nitrate used in Hepner’s uranotypes release radioactive emissions, and Kawakubo’s and Takeda’s cameraless photographs, which were produced by placing photosensitive paper in direct contact with radioactive soil for extended periods of time, absorbed the very radioactive emissions they were registering visually as they were being produced. As such, all these artworks exist as radioactive objects; they release radioactive emissions.
Barthes’ notion of the punctum as an attack coming out of the photograph to wound its viewer, as a carnal connection linking the viewer and the photograph physically[75] superbly delineates, I believe, the effect of Bolen’s, Hepner’s, Kawakubo’s and Takeda’s photographs’ radioactive excess on their viewers. Radioactivity comes out of these photographs, like an arrow, to attack beholders, to pierce their skin and enter, as malignant toxins, in their body. The photographs, in irradiating viewers standing in their physical proximity, prick them. These photographs’ punctum is not, like in Barthes’ examples, a visual detail such as a flanged shoe or a children’s gaze: the punctum is here material, excessively material, and transparent, invisible –yet hinted at by the photographs’ uncanny visual qualities, by their mottles, their formless stains, their unresolved appearance and unsettling tonalities.
(b) Disturbed bodily integrity
The photographs selected as case-studies are transgressive artworks, both politically –in their creation of a countervisuality opposing nuclearist visualities– and physically –in their radioactive violation of their viewers’ bodily boundaries, which are not respected by the infiltrative capacity of radiation. They, in this sense, conform to Cashell’s claim that the threats associated with transgressive contemporary art are directed at the audience.[76] Their pricking at the viewers, their irradiative piercing of their beholders’ skin, is materially transgressive because it penetrates non-consenting bodies.
Aside from causing physical hazard, the irradiative penetration of the body performed by the radioactive photographs is conceptually threatening. It is, in its disturbance of the bodily frontier of the viewer, in its dissolution of the subject’s perception of his or her own bodily integrity, deeply disturbing. Kristeva, in discussing the collapse of the border between one’s inside and the outside that happens when one’s skin no longer guarantees the integrity of one’s “own and clean self,”[79] illustrated in her essay on abjection that the threat emanating from disintegrated inside/outside boundaries, because it looms beyond the thinkable and the tolerable, causes “dark revolts of being.”[80] The body, when conceived of as permeable, when its borders are dissolved into meaninglessness, is, according to her, abject in its ambiguity. The conceptual and psychological drama accompanying the material penetration of radiation in a beholder’s body, thus, lies in the dissolution of one’s structure of subjectivity.[81] A modern, Cartesian being, admittedly, cannot tolerate being formless –the very worst version of materiality, as per Didi-Huberman[82]– nor being a “transitive host” in which resonates an inner-outer environment.[83] This is why standing in physical proximity and looking at radioactive photographs is deeply disturbing: one, knowing that an artwork is irradiating his or her body as he/she contemplates the work, is forced to accept that the very formlessness and formal instability showcased in the photograph comes to reflect the material condition of his/her very inside. As if looking at an X-Ray reflection of themselves, at a mirror piercing their skin to illuminate their inner radioactivity, the viewers of these photographs are confronted to the abject image of their own irradiated body. It is as if they were looking at their own auto-radiograph (see fig. 15 for an example of a fish’s auto-radiograph, which was realized in 1946 as a bio-calculus to measure the animal’s radiation exposure), or, to recall the exclamation Wilhem Rontgen’s wife made upon seeing, in the first X-Ray ever produced, her skeleton under the ghostly shape of her hand, it is as if they are seeing what their “own death” looks like.[84]
In sum, because it causes a dissolution of one’s material and conceptual bodily frontiers, the radioactive punctum of Bolen’s, Hepner’s, Kawakubo’s and Takeda’s photographs is deeply disturbing.
Fig. 15. U.S. Military, Radio-autograph of a tropical puffer fish, 1946. Radio-autograph. From the book Operation Crossroads: The Official Pictorial Record, Wm. H. Wise & Co.
(c) Embodiment and affect
While we are not typically aware of our body’s involvement in viewing a photograph,[85] I expect the viewing experience provoked by these photographs’ radioactive punctum to be distinctly embodied. One inevitably becomes aware of his or her phenomenological corporeality, I suggest, upon looking at, as described above, a (not-so-)metaphorical mirroring his/her/their body’s inside through a radioactive photograph. One has to slow down –to pause, for a moment–, in order to clarify what this “densely corporeal, experientially felt thing”[86] means, what this experience of bodily meaninglessness and porosity to radiation implies for someone living in a radioactive present that is not acknowledged as such by nuclearist authorities and a “flashblinded” public consciousness.
Masco writes that the “temporal ellipsis between radiation exposure and radiation effect is a specific aspect of the nuclear uncanny, one that can generate a proliferating psychic anxiety as potentially exposed individuals realize their inability to evaluate risk in everyday life.”[87] In point of fact, because radioactivity is invisible, because nuclearist states work relentlessly at ensuring the influence of their visuality of countenance, and because the present, as present, is difficult to make sense of, exposed individuals need to navigate the world through their visceral intuition in order to manage living.[88] This is why, according to Berlant, “the present is perceived, first, affectively”;[89] why an affective and embodied feeling of being “caught up in thing,” of being a (permeable) thing among (radioactive) things,[90] is the most immediate –and, perhaps, the most effective– method to make sense of the present.
This embodied and affective activity of being reflexive about a contemporary historicity as one lives it[91] might help to overcome the unthinkability of what Jane Bennett calls “hyperobjects” –phenomena such as radioactivity and global warming–[92] by scaling such phenomena and the present moment down to an embodied and affective experience that can be circumscribed in time and space and that can be sensed prior to being interiorized cognitively. This is what Jeremy Bolen’s, Abbey Hepner’s, Yoi Kawakubo’s and Shimpei Takeda’s radioactive photographs are having their viewers accomplish.
Conclusion
The thesis of this article is that materialized information, such as that vibrating in the contemporary art photographs taken as case-studies, which are capturing and releasing radiation, is a powerful mediatic alternative to a strictly visual rendering of information. I have argued that radioactive photographs have the potential to cause affective, embodied responses in beholders by disturbing their bodily integrity, the material frontier of their very being.
To convince my readers of the adequacy of such claims, I have, after presenting a brief history of nuclear undertakings in Japan and the United States and describing the artworks selected as case-studies: (I) explained how the selected artworks exceed visuality by (a) analyzing how these photographs overcome and offer an alternative to the typical visual strategies employed to address nuclear threats and how they resist authoritarian nuclearist visualities and by (b) describing how the artworks, as new forms of information, are materialized countervisualities revolutionizing and redistributing the sensible; and (II) theorized these artworks’ strategy as one wherein radioactivity is released to provoke embodied responses by (a) discussing the photographs’ release of radioactivity as a Barthesian punctum, (b) analyzing this radioactive punctum as disturbing the bodily integrity of viewers, and finally, (c) interpreting the ensuing response as an embodied and affective way to understand the radioactive present.
The artworks I have analyzed in this essay are not only simply documenting radioactivity, as some of these artists describe them:[93] they have an important phenomenological substance, an embodied and deeply affective presence that works in excess of vision. Because they are dangerously and threateningly materialized and form-ed, these radioactive photographs are disturbingly poignant.
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Endnotes
[1] The very first planned nuclear explosion of history took place in New Mexico, in July 1945. It was a test undertaken by Americans in their own territory. Although it did not cause direct casualties, as opposed to Hirsohima and Nagasaki’s bombs, the tests’ long-term effects on both nature, human health and human culture are rather somber. Joseph Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands: the Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
[2] The “Anthropocene,” a geological term indicating the new geological age caused and initiated by an exacerbated human impact on Earth systems, starting in 1945, is increasingly adopted in the human sciences. Elaine Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson and Nils Bubandt, eds. “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), G1-16.
[3] Jesse Hicks, “Atoms for Peace: The Mixed Legacy of Eisenhower’s Nuclear Gambit,” Science History.org, July 19, 2014. https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/atoms-for-peace-the-mixed-legacy-of-eisenhowers-nuclear-gambit.
[4] World Nuclear Association, “Nuclear Power in Japan,” World-Nuclear.org, revised August 2019. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-g-n/japan-nuclear-power.aspx.
[5] Barbara Geilhorn and Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt (eds), “Introduction,” in Fukushima and the Arts: Negotiating Nuclear Disaster (Milton: Taylor and Francis, 2016), 1-2; Pablo Figuera, “Subversion and nostalgia in art photography of the Fukushima nuclear disaster,” in Geilhorn and Iwata-Weickgenannt (eds), Fukushima and the Arts: Negotiating Nuclear Disaster (Milton: Taylor and Francis, 2016), 58.
[6] Mikuriya Takashi, cited in Geilhorn and Iwata-Weickgenannt, “Introduction,” 3.
[7] Jacques Derrida, cited in John O’Brian (ed), “Introduction: Through a Radioactive Lens,” in Camera Atomica (London, UK: Black Dog Publishing, 2015), 77; Geilhorn and Iwata-Weickgenannt, “Introduction,” 5-7.
[8] Geilhorn and Iwata-Weickgenannt, “Introduction,” 7; Figuera, “Subversion and nostalgia,” 58.
[9] Hiromitsu Toyosaki, “Hidden and Forgotten Hibakusha: Nuclear Legacy,” in O’Brian (ed), Camera Atomica (London, UK: Black Dog Publishing, 2015), 162.
[10] Ibid; Geilhorn and Iwata-Weickgenannt, “Introduction,” 5.
[11] O’Brian, “Introduction,” 77.
[12] Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands, 4.
[13] Ibid, 18.
[14] Ibid, 9.
[15] Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Posing by the Cloud: US Nuclear Test Site Photography in Process,” in O’Brian (ed), Camera Atomica (London, UK: Black Dog Publishing, 2015), 118.
[16] Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands, 18.
[17] Ronan Farrow and Rich McHugh, “Welcome to ‘the Most Toxic Place in America’,” NBC News.com, November 29, 2016. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/welcome-most-toxic-place-america-n689141.
[18] Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands, 26.
[19] Monica Westin, “CERN/Jeremy Bolen,” (Andrew Rafacz Gallery: catalog essay, 2013).
[20] Jeremy Bolen, cited in Caroline Picard, “The Stage of Scientific Reproduction: An Interview with Jeremy Bolen,” Magazine.Art21.org, February 26, 2013. http://magazine.art21.org/2013/02/26/center-field-the-stage-of-scientific-reproduction-an-interview-with-jeremy-bolen/#.XeIPSsvCHZt.
[21] According to Georges Didi-Huberman, formlessness and plasticity, as insurrections against form, are inevitably disturbing. Georges Didi-Huberman, “The order of material: Plasticities, malaises, survivals,” in Taylor (ed), Sculpture and Psychoanalysis (Surrey: Ashgate Press, 2006), 196, 200.
[22] The artworks, in themselves, as “primary information,” do not provide the context required for beholders to understand what the radiograms are and that the photographed sites are nuclear landscapes. It is only by reading an information panel beside the pieces or an exhibition booklet that viewers can understand the artworks’ context. Secondary information, unavailable in the artworks themselves, thus becomes extremely important. This conceptual strategy was famously popularized by curator and critic Seth Siegelaub in the 1960s and 1970s, who promoted a “dematerialized” art existing primarily as the dissemination of information. Alexander Alberro, “The Siegelaub Idea,” in Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 159.
[23] Jeremy Bolen, “Site A/Plot M,” Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 44 (2018): 52.
[24] Abbey Hepner, “Transuranic,” Abbey-Hepner.com, last accessed November 29, 2019. http://abbey-hepner.com/#/work/transuranic/.
[25] Linda Alterwitz, “Art + Science: Women and Earth: Abbey Hepner,” Lens/Scratch.com, February 12, 2018. http://lenscratch.com/2018/02/art-science-women-and-earth-abbey-hepner/.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Zora J. Murff, “Q&A: Abbey Hepner,” Strange Fire Collective.com, July 20, 2017. http://www.strangefirecollective.com/qa-abbey-hepner.
[28] Megan Geuss, “Fukushima, Vieques, Rocky Flats: Radioactive photos tell nuclear stories,” Ars Technica.com, August 7, 2016. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/07/fukushima-vieques-rocky-flats-radioactive-photos-tell-nuclear-stories/.
[29] Abbey Hepner, “Info,” Abbey-Hepner.com, last accessed November 29, 2019. http://abbey-hepner.com/#/info/.
[30] Murff, “Q&A: Abbey Hepner.”
[31] Atomic Heritage Foundation and the National Museum of Science and History, “J. Robert Oppenheimer,” Atomic Heritage.org, last accessed November 29, 2019. https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/j-robert-oppenheimer.
[32] With this claim, Oppenheimer compared himself to the Hindu god of destruction of the Bahagavad Gita.
Yoi Kawakubo, “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the skies,” Yoi Kawakubo.com, last accessed November 29, 2019. https://www.yoikawakubo.com/thousand-suns.
[33] Pat O’Malley, “Shimpei Takeda Makes Art Out of Radioactive Dirt,” VICE.com, June 28, 2013. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3b5xkj/shimpei-takeda-123.
[34] Kimberly Roberts, “Landscape + Photography = A Collaboration,” Denver Art Museum.org, June 20, 2018, https://denverartmuseum.org/article/landscape-photography-collaboration.
[35] Shimpei Takeda, “Trace,” Shimpei Takeda.com, last accessed November 29, 2019. http://www.shimpeitakeda.com/trace/.
[36] Taryn Utiger, “New ‘Emanations’ exhibition at the Len Lye Centre includes work from around the world,” Taranaki Daily News, May 12, 2016. https://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/lifestyle/79569302/new-emanations-exhibition-at-the-len-lye-centre-includes-work-from-around-the-world.
[37] Nicholas Mirzoeff. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
[38] Roland Barthes, La chambre claire : note sur la photographie (Paris : Gallimard, 1980).
[39] Wall text, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Hiroshima, Japan. Visited in August 2019.
[40] Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “The Iconic Image of the Mushroom Cloud and the Cold War Nuclear Optic,” in Batchen, Gidley, Miller and Prosser (eds), Picturing Atrocity (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 143.
[41] O’Brian, “Introduction,” 78.
[42] Susan Schuppli, “Radial Contact Prints,” in O’Brian (ed), Camera Atomica (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2015), 280; Hariman and Lucaites, “The Iconic Image of the Mushroom Cloud,” 143.
[43] Hariman and Lucaites, “The Iconic Image of the Mushroom Cloud,” 136, 144.
[44] Blake Fitzpatrick, “Atomic Photographs Below the Surface,” in O’Brian (ed), Camera Atomic (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2015), 170.
[45] John Roberts, “Photography after the Photograph: Event, Archive, and the Non-Symbolic,” Oxford Art Journal 32, 2 (2009), 284.
[46] Figuera, “Subversion and Nostalgia,” 60.
[47] Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 24.
[48] Geilhorn and Iwata-Weickgenannt, “Introduction,” 9.
[49] Jay Prosser, “Introduction,” in Batchen, Gidley, Miller and Prosser (eds), Picturing Atrocity (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 8.
[50] Geoffrey Batchen, Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (Munich: DelMonico Book, 2015), 45.
[51] Geoffrey Batchen (ed), “Looking Askance,” in Picturing Atrocity (London: Reaktion Book, 2012), 238.
[52] Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 61-62.
[53] Nuclearist: “A believer in or advocate of the possession or use of nuclear weapons; a nation that possesses nuclear weapons.” Oxford Dictionary, “Nuclearist,” Lexico.com, last accessed November 30, 2019. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/nuclearist.
[54] Tony Bennett, “Art and Theory: The Politics of the Invisible,” in Theory Rules, Jody Berland, Will Straw and David Tomas (eds), (Buffalo and Toronto: YYZ Books and University of Toronto Press, 1996), 301.
[55] Mirzoeff, The Right to Look.
[56] Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands, 9-10.
[57] Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 105.
[58] Alexander Galloway, “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 7-8 (2011), 88.
[59] Malcom McCullough, Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2013), 37.
[60] Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October Journal 110 (2004), 4; Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 33.
[61] Barthes, La chambre claire, 177.
[62] Batchen, Emanations, 5
[63] Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 4, 24.
[64] Batchen, Emanations, 47.
[65] Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 4.
[66] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2000).
[67] Schuppli, “Radical Contact Prints,” 289.
[68] Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 24.
[69] Ibid, 32.
[70] Shawn Michelle Smith, At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 7.
[71] Barthes, La chambre claire, 71.
[72] Ibid, 77.
[73] “[…] c’est [le punctum] qui part de la scène, comme une flèche, et vient me percer.”; “Le punctum d’une photo, c’est ce hasard qui, en elle, me point (mais aussi me meurtrit, me poigne.)” Barthes, La chambre claire, 48.
[74] Ibid, 42.
[75] Ibid, 126.
[76] Kieran Cashell, Aftershock: The Ethics of Contemporary Transgressive Art (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 2.
[77] Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Milwaukee: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 29.
[78] K Sansare, V Khanna and F Karjodkar, “Early victims of X-rays: a tribute and current perception,” The British Institute of Radiology: Dentomaxillofacial Radiology 40 (2011).
[79] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, transl. L S Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 53.
[80] Ibid, 1.
[81] Lippit, Atomic Light, 42.
[82] Didi-Huberman, “The Order of Material,” 196.
[83] Giorgia Fiorio, “The Ontology of Vision. The Invisible, Consciousness of Living Matter,” Frontiers in Psychology 7: 89 (2016).
[84] Batchen, Emanations, 15.
[85] Prosser, “Introduction,” 9.
[86] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 64.
[87] Emphasis mine. Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands, 32.
[88] Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 52.
[89] Ibid, 4.
[90] Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28: 1 (2001), 4.
[91] Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 7.
[92] Jane Bennett. “System and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Thimoty Morton,” New Literary History 43: 2 (2012), 229-230.
[93] “I consider it to be a documentary mode of photography,” says Bolen, and “It is […]a scientific documentation of the disaster,” says Takeda. In Jessica Mlinaric, “Radiation Underfoot,” Chicago Mag.org, March 2018. https://www.
chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/March-2018/Hidden-Chicago-2018/Radiation-Underfoot/; Friends of the Pleistocene, “Trace: An Interview with Artist Shimpei Takeda,” FOP News.wordpress.com, October 2012. https://fopnews.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/trace-an-interview-with-artist-shimpei-takeda/.
[94] Alberro, “The Siegelaub Idea.”
[95] United States Environmental Protection Agency, “Jackpile-Paguate Uranium Mine Laguna Pueblo, NM,” EPA.gov, last accessed November 29, 2019. https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.Cleanup.
[96] Argonne National Laboratory, “Our History: Inspiring the Nation’s Future,” ANL.gov, last accessed November 29, 2019. https://www.anl.gov/our-history.
[97] Geuss, “Fukushima, Vieques, Rocky Flats.”
[98] Office of Enterprise Assessments, “Hanford,” Energy.gov, last accessed November 29, 2019. https://www.energy.gov/ea/hanford.