THE BOMB WE NEVER SEE
Schell, Jonathan
The Bomb We Never See PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBERT DEL TREDICI WITH TEXT BY JONATHAN SCHELL IN the hours immedi-ately after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945, Yoshito Matsushige...
...Del Tredici invites us to look at what we can see...
...All of this is a far cry from the dramatic renderings on television and elsewhere that are sometimes offered to rouse us to the peril of nuclear war, but it may offer a more authentic clue to the nature of the peril, whose direst consequence, after all, is eternal nothingness...
...The ultimate peril posed by nuclear weapons is the extinction of mankind, but that event, in its very nature, must always remain invisible to us—not because there won't be a great deal to see but because, by definition, when the last act is played there will be no one left to see it...
...This view of the nuclear peril is necessarily an oblique one, but Del Tredici has the qualities needed for oblique observation: quiet attention to detail, the ability to find meaning in "ordinary" sights, a feel for "the spirit of a place...
...And they were all burned black, a reddish black, and they were stiff...
...No story I know of illustrates Robert Del Tredici spent six years photographing the people and plants that make America's nuclear weapons...
...We'd remain on alert until, well, um, basically until we're told not to be...
...Matsushige, who was a photographer for the Hiroshima newspaper Chugoku Shimbun, found himself confronted at one point in his wanderings with a streetcar full of dead people...
...In The Waves by Virginia Woolf, there is the recurring line "a fin in a waste of waters," which the reader can interpret as a portent of death...
...These images, "designed to be a new visual alphabet for the Bomb," are from the book "At Work in the Fields of the Bomb," by Robert Del Tredici...
...The opportunity to look back on catastrophes and learn from them is like a second chance—a sort of forgiveness that is built into the very nature of human events...
...The very actuality of the factories, strangely, comes as a kind of surprise—as if, having learned to think of the nuclear peril as "unthinkable," we find it startling to see the actual machinery being run by actual people in actual communities...
...The Bomb We Never See PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBERT DEL TREDICI WITH TEXT BY JONATHAN SCHELL IN the hours immedi-ately after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945, Yoshito Matsushige wandered through the city with camera in hand, sometimes managing to take pictures but at other times refraining...
...Robert Del Tredici's photographs are addressed to this task...
...Seeking to account for his paralysis, he explained, "Before I became a professional cameraman I had been just an ordinary person...
...Matsushige's story shows that the invisibility of the bomb has deep psychological and spiritual causes, yet this invisibility also has what might be called a structural cause...
...That note is struck, for example, in the words of Paul Wagner, public-relations manager for the Department of Energy at Pantex, near Amarillo, Texas...
...A plant at which uranium salt crystals are converted into metal is no doubt a less exciting sight than the destruction of the world...
...Missing here, of course, is the drama and spectacle of "doom...
...They offer, for the first time, a basic visual vocabulary for the processes by which we are preparing our self-destruction...
...A note of blankness is present also in the photograph of, and interview with, the two stalwart young men whose job it is to stand ready to launch Minuteman missiles...
...Also missing is any feeling of romantic grandeur in connection with the bomb—a feeling best represented, perhaps by Robert Oppenheimer's grandiose thought (derived from a line in the Bhagavad Gitd) upon seeing the first explosion of an atomic weapon, in Alamo-gordo, New Mexico: "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds...
...He was a professional photographer...
...The introduction is by Jonathan Schell, the author of "The Fate of the Earth...
...Asked to rehearse a missile launch, they perform in perfect clockwork, but when asked what they would do after the missiles have been released, they falter "Well, um—then we have other, uh, procedures to get through...
...In that sense, he has photographed for us the end of the world...
...He has pitted his camera against all the forms of the bomb's invisibility...
...The scenes shown in Robert Del Tredici's photographs are the fin of mankind's death breaking the waters of our world...
...It was jammed with people...
...Yet he could not take the picture...
...There will never be anything more...
...Every human catastrophe short of extinction leaves behind witnesses who can record what has happened, permitting the rest of us to write about it, raise monuments to the victims, or otherwise seek to express its meaning...
...They were all in normal positions, holding onto streetcar straps, sitting down or standing still, just the way they would have been before the bomb went off...
...We cannot be witnesses to our own extinction...
...Matsushige stood face to face with the truth of the nuclear age...
...Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc...
...But in the case of extinction, the second chance is repealed and forgiveness withdrawn...
...I went up to it and looked inside," he told Robert Del Tre-dici...
...But precisely because we can't see the destruction of the world, the preparations for bringing it about deserve our special attention...
...The verdict is eternal...
...Matsushige put one foot up on the streetcar, raised his camera to his eye, and put his finger on the shutter, but he found that he could not take the picture...
...We need to find in the present some equivalent of the processes that usually occur through recollection: We are asked to "remember" what hasn't yet happened, to "mourn" for victims who have not yet died, to learn from "experience" we have not had and can never have...
...He had the idea, as original as it was simple, of traveling through the United States to photograph the H-bomb factories...
...Wagner describes the nuclear peril as "the biggest non-issue of the Twentieth Century" and says that for him handling nuclear weapons is "just like pickin' up a box of Silly Putty in a dime store...
...more starkly the immense, unique difficulties that have faced all of us in trying to grasp the reality of the nuclear peril-to penetrate what Del Tredici has called the "amazing invisibility" of the bomb...
...Copyright © 1987 by Robert Del Tredici...
...Instead, almost half a century later, the note that is repeatedly struck is one of blank-ness...
...Therefore, in the matter of this one peril any wisdom we might seek to bring to bear must come before the fact...
...Except that all of them were leaning in the same direction— away from the blast...
...The photographs reward our attention...
Vol. 51 • December 1987 • No. 12
