Exhibition
ORDINARY-LIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY LONDON ART FAIR DOOMSDAY MACHINE - Business Design Centre
Doomsday Machine
In the quest for scientific inquiry, photography stands notably alone in its pursuit for literal translations of man’s noble capacity for technological ingenuity. The medium itself is not always the purest form of truth, but it does often stand to make objective reason of humankind’s development. On ocasssion, the technological advances documented are illustrious and serve to enlighten a broader audience of its progress. For example, the first photographs of the moon pivotally gave man a larger sense of his place in the universe. It opened up further doors to the evolutionary debate in the Victorian era. Adversely, the first microphotographs of snowflakes gave insight into the little worlds which we have taken for granted. In all of the photographic challenges therein lies a keen sense to discover or to create worlds in which the camera’s unerring eye never ceases to bring accordance to its subject. Paradoxically, the medium is also used to document man’s greatest forces of its own destruction.
For the first time, we are bringing together an archive of photographic magnitude, which to our knowledge has been never displayed in England: Images of the Atomic and Nuclear bomb. We have painstakingly gathered over 200 vintage photographs of the bomb, its creation, and its subsequent tests. The collection also consists of the bombs victims, its use in Japan, and its reminder that the threat still exists. As well as gathering objective photographs for the show, we are also buying visual aids of the Bombs destruction and the media's capacity to play on the fear created by the bomb. There will be newspapers, vintage fallout instructions, and also vintage 16MM film that could be played in a small subsequent room.
