Photographing the Nuclear Body: Robert Del Tredici and John O’Brian in conversation
16 February 2017, at 4:00
Concordia University, EV-3.719
Robert Del Tredici, Maids of Muslyuomovo, 1991. Tartar-Bakshir women from the village of Muslyuomovo watch Western scientists measure elevated levels of radiation in the Techa river that flows past their town. 35 km. upstream lies the Chelyabinsk reactor; it made plutonium for the first Soviet atomic bombs. Forty years earlier engineers dumped high-level liquid radioactive waste into the Techa for four years without informing villagers. These women are discovering for the first time the reason for so many health problems in their area. Village of Muslyumovo, Chelyabinsk Region, Russia. 17 March 1991.
John O’Brian writes: “The global footprint of the nuclear body can be measured by vast infrastructural networks. The networks include weapons laboratories, test sites, uranium mines, enrichment facilities, missile launching platforms and satellite technology that encircle the planet – and threaten the human body. The nuclear body and the human body are fused at the hip.”
John O’Brian is an art historian, writer and curator. He has organized exhibitions on photography and the nuclear era – The Nuclear Machine (Copenhagen, 2016), Camera Atomica (Toronto, 2015), After the Flash (London, 2014), Strangelove’s Weegee (Vancouver, 2013) – and published twenty books, including Ruthless Hedonism: The American Reception of Matisse and David Milne and the Modern Tradition of Painting as well as Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, which he edited. He lives in Vancouver and is Professor of Art History at the University of British Columbia.
Robert Del Tredici is an artist, photographer, author, and teacher who has been documenting all facets of the nuclear age since the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in 1979. He has photographed the entire US Nuclear Weapons complex, documented survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, toured the uranium mines of New Mexico and northern Canada and founded the Atomic Photographers Guild. He teaches Photojournalism and The History of Animated Film at Concordia University in Montreal. He has published five books on the nuclear age.
