Photography plays a crucial role in shaping public perceptions of the atomic age and its legacy of anxiety. Cameras not only record nuclear events, but also assist in their production–whether as agencts of scientific measurement, propaganda or protest. They witness the unseeable on our behalf, offering insight into broader nuclear narratives and receal recurring tesions between invisibility and visibility, and obliteration and transformation.
Drawing on the extensive personal archive of art historian and curator John O'Brian, After the Flash focuses on North American visual culture from the 1940s to the 1980s, coinciding with the golden age of photojournalism. The exhibition comprises three sections: Cameras and Clouds; At Work in the Fields of the Bomb; and The Culture of Contamination.
After the Flash is curated by John O'Brian and Marianne Templeton. It precedes a major retrospective exhibition of nuclear-themed photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2015, Camera Atomica, curated by John O'Brian. An accompanying publication by Black Dog Publishing and AGO, Camera Atomica, is edited by O'Brian and designed by João Mota.