ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Photographing the Atomic World: Visual Nuclear Histories Beyond the Global North

• In Event: Nuclear History as Global History: Current Debates and New Perspectives 3

English Abstract

Preparing my recent exhibition on the history of radiation protection entitled “Living with Radiation” I realized that there has been an amazingly rich paper and digital trail of photographs that documents the development of the nuclear industry and science. Yet, these images overwhelmingly document nuclear history in the Global North, while maintaining a certain historiographical perspective on and view of what was for decades termed as developing countries. For a long time, images have been used as sources of historical knowledge, and as an additional and corrective source to textual sources. Scholars have sought in photographs demonstrable ways to support historical claims. They have used them as biographical and autobiographical sources complementary to oral histories. For “text-heavy” historians, images have value when they support historical narratives. Yet, the recent visual or iconic turn in history elevates images to a different epistemological and historiographic status. Visual images could function as a language that helps historians break from the naturalized canon that oral histories, texts, and artifacts create. Here I argue that photographs are not simply pictorial representations of things; they are part of a dialogue that involves nuclear history, ethics, and relational accountability of photographers and institutions such as museums and archives that become part of photographs’ biography as well as of researchers. In short, making a global nuclear history requires us to expand the visual geography of nuclear history beyond its dominant Euro-American frame, which will allow for the emergence of new narratives, shaped by different local experiences, aesthetics, and power relations.

Author

• Maria Rentetzi