100 Suns, by Michael Light

100 Suns is not only one of my favorite nuclear weapons books, but one of my favorite photobooks, period. Its premise is simple: Make high-quality prints of some of the many still photographs of nuclear tests and put them in a book. It’s a thing of beauty, lovingly printed, and it all just works. Sadly, it is out of print and expensive on the used market. Light does have a small gallery of images on his website but surrounded by all of that white space and displayed so small, the images lose something vital. Get the book if you can. It is a treasure.

Links
Video “flip-through” of 100 Suns.
Images on Michael Light’s website.

At Work In the Fields of the Bomb, by Robert Del Tredici

Somehow, almost inconceivably, I didn’t discover this book until after most of the photography for American Nukes had been completed. Tredici, in 1987, published the results of over half a decade of work on the whole nuclear weapons ecosystem–everything from the uranium mines, the purification and manufacturing process of the uranium and plutonium, to weapons design and engineering, to the storage, planning, and use of nuclear weapons, including the health effects of the weapons on populations. In other words, in an effort to raise awareness of the Bomb in a society so quickly falling asleep on the issue so soon after the swelling of anti-nuclear sentiment in the early 1980s, he aimed at everything and hit his target more or less bullseye. The first half of the book is made up of photographs. Portraits, aerial photographs of manufacturing facilities, pictures of weapons, all with short captions next to the photograph and keyed to more extensive information later on. The second half of the book offers more detail, including numerous interviews with people with direct knowledge of nuclear weapons. Famous names are there (e.g. Paul Tibbets, Edward Teller), names known well in the nuclear weapons community (e.g. Ted Taylor), and many more of less renown but with insightful, first-hand experiences to share. Like so many other bodies of work, Fields is out of print and expensive on the used market. It needs to be reissued or a reconfigured into a web page.

Link
Tredici’s work at the Atomic Photographer’s Guild.

Paul Shambroom

Recently retired from the University of Minnesota, Shambroom has (amongst other projects) traveled the country making photographs of nuclear weapons at roadside stands, New England churches, and at gas stations. And he was doing it fifteen years before me, sigh. His book most directly about nuclear weapons, Face to Face with the Bomb, is worth getting for anyone interested in nuclear weapons. Somehow, he got access to military bases and photographed real weapons, ready for use. I can’t think of anyone else who has done this. His web page has an excellent overview of the work. In addition, he has a photo series on weapons, including nuclear weapons, in his Shrines project. This is the work that speaks most strongly to me.

Links
Shambroom’s Shrine images from his web page. Also see his Face to Face with the Bomb images.

How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb, by Peter Kuran

Did you know that the Air Force had its own film studio, located in the famed Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills? Lookout Mountain made films of surprising quality and did especially interesting work photographing nuclear tests. A labor of love (if that is the right phrase) from animator Peter Kuran, How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb is a delightful peek behind the scenes for anyone interested in the challenges of photographing nuclear explosions. At Atom Central, Kuran’s site, the book appears to be out of print but check with them to see if there are additional copies or another press run on the way.

Links
If you are a subscriber to the New York Times (you should be), they ran a slideshow of Kuran’s book back in 2010.
Kuran founded one of the “go-to” sites on the internet, Atom Central, for learning about nuclear weapons. Well worth a visit and bookmarking.

Patrick Nagatani

Nagatani was a professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and he used that perch to explore the rich nuclear weapons history of the area, especially in his Nuclear Enchantment project, which became a traveling exhibition (organized by the Akron Art Museum) and a book of the same name. The photographs are collages and I often can see some of the very weapons that I have photographed myself embedded in his work, which is a strange species of déjà vu. Out of print and a little expensive, Nagatani’s website (he died in 2017) is online with a large selection of images from his project (click on “Bodies of Work,” then “Nuclear Enchantment”).

Links
Andrew Smith Gallery, which represents his work.
Lenscratch showcases many of the images in the project.
The Houston Center for Photography has its own selection, accompanied by an essay by Nagatani’s brother, Nick Nagatani.

Camera Atomica, Edited by John O’Brian

Camera Atomica is a thick paperback with images from all sorts of photographers, including some already on this list. Its full title, which I can find nowhere in the book itself but appears in listings for the book on the internet, is Camera Atomica: Photographing the Nuclear World. And the photographs are diverse and sometimes wonderful. It’s a treasure chest of images. Still available new at Amazon as of this writing.

Links
Buy the book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or at a used bookstore.
You can get a taste of the book by looking at these scanned pages.

The Nevada Test Site, by Emmet Gowin

Emmet Gowin’s fame as a photographer probably rests mostly on his earlier work–pictures of his wife and life, but for the past few decades he has been especially interested in aerial photographs. This body of work, published as a book in 1997, documents the land after nuclear tests–even underground tests leave craters on the surface as the subsurface areas collapse. It’s a weird moonscape, and Gown’s captions link each view to the specific atomic tests that caused the craters. Like almost all aerial photos, the images veer into abstraction and it is usually impossible to tell how large the craters are, how to compare them to anything on a human scale, when even the man-made buildings and highways are so abstracted that you can’t get a sense of even their scale. Nevertheless, Gowin’s photographs give the best idea we are going to get of what the landscape might look like after a nuclear war.

Links
This New Yorker article is an excellent overview of Gowin’s nuclear test site work.
You can see more of Gowin’s photographs at Atomic Photographers and Artists.

Weapons of Mass Destruction, by Martin Miller

Dark and brooding, Martin Miller traveled to several museums to photograph their nuclear weapons, masking out and darkening the busy backgrounds and isolating the weapons with the idea that focusing on the weapons would focus the viewer’s mind. Though the book is published by a military-oriented press, these weapons are somber, quietly threatening, shadowy both in appearance and in the threat they pose. They are portraits of weapons and the weapons are posed and poised, old but not inert. He has a related book, a companion volume which looks at the artifacts of the Manhattan Project.

Link
The publisher, Shiffer Publishing, has a few sample pages of Weapons of Mass Destruction–and the book is available for purchase. His companion book, The Neutron’s Long Shadow: Legacies of Nuclear Explosives Production in the Manhattan Project, is also available.