Paul shambroom face to face with the bomb

Abstract

Face-To-Face With the Bomb: Nuclear Reality After the Cold War, Photographs by Paul Shambroom. Introduction by Richard Rhodes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. The following dialogue is a distillation of conversations between Paul Shambroom and the author about Shambroom's project and book Face-to-Face With the Bomb. Paul Shambroom's next book, dealing with power, Meetings, is due in September 2004. It is the result of Shambroom attending hundreds of small-town America council meetings and photographing the participants with a large format camera to depict the humble practice of local government in a classic, tableaux scale. This latter project was shown at Le Mois de la Photo in Montreal last fall; it will be exhibited at the Rencontres d'Arles this summer. Paul Shambroom is represented by the Julie Saul Gallery in New York. Info: http://www.paulshambroomart.com Robert Hirsch: Briefly describe your project. Paul Shambroom: In a fairly encyclopedic fashion, I photographed the U.S. arsenal of nuclear strategic weapons that were deployed at the end of the Cold War. Around 1990 I began a long and tedious access and research process that continued for the 10 plus years of the project. It involved a Christo-like interest in process and negotiation with the military. I had letters of recommendations from my congressional delegation, but none of this would have happened without the cooperation of the top public affairs officials of the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and the Pentagon. I was allowed to photograph bombers, missiles, submarines, warheads, and associated facilities throughout the U.S.A. Since 1992 I made 35 visits to more than two-dozen weapons and command sites (plus hundreds of individual ICBM silos) in 16 states. How did this project come about? It's been an interest of mine to explore the different manifestations of power. Previously I did several series on hidden places of power such as corporate offices, factories, and police stations. I've always been interested in politics and like many other photographers I wanted to show things that had not been seen before. Nuclear power was an extension of this work--the ultimate in power and as a professional challenge to show what was unseen. What lead you down this path? My father was in the U.S. Navy and visited Nagasaki 8 months after the atomic bomb was dropped there, but I was not aware of that at the time I embarked upon this project. It really stems from my experience of growing up at the height of the Cold War and thinking about it a lot and imagining what I would do if there was a nuclear war. Would I go down into a shelter? I told my friends that I would stand outside and watch the inside of my eyeballs melt. Of course that was a juvenile, rebellious response that went along with a total package of rejecting the older generations values, but it did indicate the powerlessness I felt about this life and death situation, and the madness of planning to survive an all out nuclear war. What motivated you to make these photographs? The core reason was to confront the bogeyman, which was the psychological presence of nuclear weapons, the fear of a terrifying invisible thing. I worked with the notion that these things do not have to be invisible. These are real things and if I made the effort, it might be possible to photograph them. For me the nuclear bogeyman was being led down a long hall of our grade school, having to get down on our knees in front of our lockers, putting our hands over our heads, and hearing the sound of the bomb doors closing. It was part of emotional environment of that time. In the fifth grade I wrote what I considered to be a sarcastic, wise guy poem that also contained a modicum of truth: Look up in the sky. See the pretty mushroom cloud. Soon we will be dead. Since then I have come to learn that the intention of civil defense procedures was not really to protect people, but to convince the then Soviet Union that we meant business and were equipping our population to survive. …