Art Review - February Issue - (Page 110)

Warning : session_start : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 9 Warning : session_start : Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent output started at /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php:9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 9 Warning : Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by output started at /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php:9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 10 LIGHTBOX EXPLOSIONS ‘INSTANTANEOUS!’ IN HIS 1907 NOVEL THE SECRET AGENT, Joseph Conrad describes a botched attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory and thereby, metaphorically, to arrest the very flow of time. Ultimately, a hapless anarchist succeeds only in blowing himself to pieces. In the wake of a grisly cleanup operation, the aptly named Chief Inspector Heat cannot quite believe that the explosion, and with it the man’s su ering, was over in the blink of an eye: ‘it seemed impossible to believe that a human body could have reached that state of disintegration without passing through the pangs of inconceivable agony. No physiologist, and still less of a metaphysician, Chief Inspector Heat rose by the force of sympathy, which is a form of fear, above the vulgar conception of time.’ The explosion is an unbelievable breach in chronology: it can hardly be said to occur at all, except in the radiating force field of its horrific consequences. What does it mean to photograph such an event? The problem was a technical and ideological one for the US military in August 1945, when Sergeant George Caron, seated in the tail of the Enola Gay, produced a photograph of a burgeoning dome of heat and light above Hiroshima. Indeed, the first photograph actually released to the press showed instead the mushroom cloud from a test carried out in New Mexico a month earlier. The instantaneity of an atomic explosion was in a sense unrepresentable, and had to be substituted, from a propagandist point of view, with the death’s-head wraith an ‘anatomical bomb’, wrote Life magazine that quickly became familiar as the image of nuclear catastrophe. At the same time, Harold Edgerton was attempting to get closer to the event itself: in 1953 his Rapatronic camera allowed an exposure 0.0001 seconds after detonation, resulting in an image that looks subatomic, self-contained and weirdly vegetal. Every photograph of an explosion ‘of’ is relative here: where or when does the thing really happen? exists somewhere on the continuum between actuality and symbolism, the instant and its meaningful aftermath. It may be that we preceding page: Sarah Pickering, Fuel Air can only make sense of the wreckage, not the rupture. Among the most potent photographs of the destruction of Nagasaki Explosion, 2005. © the artist. Courtesy the Photographers’ is Shomei Tomatsu’s image of a watch stopped at 11.02, the precise moment of the explosion. In the Atlas Group’s Gallery, London photographic archive of the wreckage wrought by car bombs during the 1975–91 Lebanese wars, we see one of the Middle above: Tess Hurrell, Chaology nos. 1–4, 2006. Digital c-type East’s most familiar metonyms for destruction rigorously anatomised. And in Gianni Motti’s Collateral Damage 2001 – a print, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist series of photographs, bought from a press agency that considered them ‘too aesthetic’, showing Balkan countryside under FOR HOLLYWOOD, A BOMB BLAST IS MERELY A FIREBALL, WITHOUT SMOKE OR DEBRIS. ITS ONLY FORCE IS THAT WHICH PROPELS THE HERO FORWARD TO SAFETY p109-111 Lightbox AR Feb07.indd 2 9/1/07 14:41:00  Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in Unknown on line 0 Warning : Unknown : Failed to write session data files . Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct /var/lib/php/session in Unknown on line 0

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - February Issue

Art Review - February Issue

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