Atomic Postcards

Jeremy Borsos, John OBrian

Description

John O’Brian is professor of art history at the University of British Columbia.

Jeremy Borsos is a visual artist whose exhibitions have been reviewed in Art in America and Canadian Art.

RECTO | VERSO – JOHN O’BRIAN

 

THE POSTCARDS 

 

CATALOGUE 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sujets

• Popular culture
• Sociology
• Cold War
• General officer
• Art
• General
• Contemporary
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841505275
• Langue: English

Extrait

ATOMIC
POSTCARDS
First published in the UK in 2011 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2011 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2011 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design: Mark Timmings Typesetting: Holly Rose
ISBN 978-1-84150-246-5
Printed and bound by Cambrian Printers, Aberystwyth, Wales.
BY JOHN O BRIAN AND JEREMY BORSOS
ATOMIC
POSTCARDS
Radioactive Messages from the Cold War
CONTENTS
RECTO | VERSO
JOHN O BRIAN
THE POSTCARDS
CATALOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
RECTO | VERSO
JOHN O BRIAN
The title of a Chinese postcard from the 1980s, Ground-to-Ground Long-Range Missiles , is printed on the reverse side of the card. Like the titles given to most modern postcards it is matter-of-fact, but the photographic image on the front of the card is less straightforward. Taken from an elevated viewpoint high above street level, it depicts three nuclear missiles being wheeled through Beijing in a military parade. The missiles are in a horizontal position - un-cocked and functionally inert - and might almost be mistaken for giant pencil crayons, sharpened to a fine red point. They are pulled by trucks containing soldiers lined up in tight rows, a contrast to the uneven groupings of on-lookers at the top of the image. A wide crosswalk with zebra-stripes cuts underneath the trucks at right angles. The photographer responsible for the image, ZHOU Wan Ping, is concerned with the sthetic elements of his composition as much as with the atomic hardware (capable of destroying cities) he has been commissioned to photograph. The painted bands around the missiles align precisely with the painted stripes of the crosswalk, and the white tires of the trucks rhyme visually with the white globes of the streetlight in the foreground.
The design of the streetlight pictured in Ground-to-Ground Long-Range Missiles reflects a Cold War fashion in furnishings and fixtures for atomic lighting. The trend received a major impetus from the Atomium, a colossal aluminum structure more than 100 meters high representing the revolving atoms of an iron crystal that was built for the Brussels World s Fair in 1958. The Atomium quickly became an iconic tourist symbol. Images of it circulated internationally, many on postcards (p. 60), and it became a marker of Belgian national identity. The Atomium united the geography of tourism with the exigencies of nationalism under the sign of peaceful nuclear advancement, notably the technology of fissile-produced energy.
The Chinese card also links tourism and nationalism, but less in the name of peaceful advancement than of nuclear threat and deterrence. Soviet and American postcards during the Cold War period oscillated between the two positions; some promoted peace, others fire-power. Occasionally, they tried to promote both on the same card. The legend on an American postcard depicting a B-52H bomber in flight states that the aircraft is equipped with four GAM-87 nuclear missiles plus its regular bombs and concludes that it is the world s most powerful weapon for peace (p. 117). The attempt to have it both ways is located in the last three words.
The atomic postcards collected in this book date from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to the end of the Cold War in 1989. The majority are from the 1950s and 1960s. The cards were produced in a dozen countries - Belgium, Britain, Canada, China, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Philippines, Soviet Union, Switzerland, and the United States - for sale to mass audiences. Not all have been postally used (stamped and mailed), but those that have often show the marks of their travels. They have been creased or slogan cancelled, which is to say, postmarked with a printed phrase. The slogan Pray for Peace - no irony was intended - appears on the backs of three American postcards illustrated in the book (pp. 96, 104, 156). A sizeable proportion of the cards, known in the trade as chromes, were manufactured using new color processes, including Kodachrome. They offer hold-in-the-hand pictures of atomic test explosions, nuclear power plants, radiation laboratories, submarines, aircraft, short and long-range missiles, nuclear reactors, fallout shelters, and museums promoting atoms for peace, not to mention images of the ruined cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Cold War atomic postcards came in two standard sizes, regular and jumbo. To order the jumbo version of Atomic Explosion: Frenchman s Flat, or Yucca Flats, Nevada (p. 42-43), manufactured in the first half of the 1950s by Mike Roberts Color Production in Berkeley, California, distributors used the stock number J563, in which the J stood for jumbo. What can be said about the hopes and desires this postcard fulfilled for its senders and receivers? This is a beginning: the card was considered desirable for framing, or so a handwritten message on the back of a mailed version of it says:
Dearest Freda,
Knowing you like I do, I know that you will have this picture framed. That is why I am sending it to you. I have said most of what I wanted to say in a letter. Suffice it to say that we miss you and the rest of the family. God bless and keep you all.
Love kisses, Fiord family
This note to Dearest Freda from Fiord family represents an act of intimacy that cannot be readily deciphered as either for or against nuclear weapons and testing. A postcard mailed to family and friends requires a handwritten message to be complete - without a supplemental written narrative it is a homeless object rather than an item of memory and desire that marks an experience - but what does the message on this card convey? That the picture should be framed as a source of pleasure, or that it should be framed as a source of caution?
Another message, on the back of a different copy of the same postcard, refers obliquely to the community of soldiers, workers, scientists, and photographers employed in the vicinity of ground zero: where this was set off is where Elmo use[d] to work when they were here in Las Vegas. In atomic photography we rarely see Elmo, unless he is a soldier with his back turned to an explosion. Images are not released of scientists designing the weapons or of workers manufacturing them. Like the bomb s potential victims, or the radiation produced by a detonation, they are invisible.
It is characteristic of the two handwritten messages that they are expressed in the shared language of postcards. Messages on the backs of cards are almost invariably positive, like the photographic images on the front of them, not excluding those picturing nuclear detonations. Rectos and versos, fronts and backs, tend to reinforce one another s reassuring tone. If Elmo was sick with A-bomb disease and seeking compensation for maladies caused by nuclear testing in Nevada, as some soldiers and civilians were doing at the time, the message does not mention it. Even postcards mailed at the edge of danger rarely stray from a lingua franca of cheerfulness. As Susan Stewart has observed, souvenirs and postcards speak in the nostalgic language of longing. They provide a miniaturized spectacle that domesticates what is pictured, even if what is shown is implicated in traumatic historical events. To borrow a phrase from Jacques Derrida, the spectacle is one of fearful domestication. If the authority of the state is identified with vastness, the human subject is associated with smallness. Here pleasure displaces anxiety. Photographs of nuclear explosions released by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission had the effect of making you think all the world s a sunny day, in the melancholy phrasing of the song Kodachrome by Simon and Garfunkel. If the public wished to frame them for display, then the agency s program of making the atom routine was succeeding.
A widely circulated mushroom-cloud postcard from the 1950s was Atomic Bomb Explosion, Mushroom Cloud, Yucca Flats, Nevada (p. 40), published by H.S. Crocker Co., Inc., San Francisco, one of the largest printing companies in California at the time. The back of the card indicates where the test took place and states that the color photograph was supplied to the company by the U.S. Army. As with the previous card, there is no information on which test is represented. A handwritten message on the back of this chrome, mailed by Betty to her sister, Miss Agnes Julian of Kansas City, on 16 August 1954, says: Dear Sis, Having a wonderful time with Bud and Emma - really swell to be here. The sentiments of the message and the picture would seem to run together. The trademark Mirro-Krome reproduction of a spectacularized atomic explosion matches Betty s assurances to her sister that she and Bud and Emma are having a swell time. Just in case senders and recipients of the card might misunderstand the message of the image, the publishers produced a version of it with a welcome emblazoned in red letters across the top of the image: Greetings from Los Alamos, New Mexico (p. 41).
This is not an image that hints at the potential for tragedy. The greetings might just as well say, Greetings from Hiroshima. Absurdity is rarely absent from popular images of nuclear explosions. Las Vegas, a new type of urban form constructed in the name of postwar commerce and tourism, as the authors of the book Learning from Las Vegas point out, is no more than 65 miles south of Yucca Flats, the principal atomic test site. The spectacle of watching the bombs go off was one of the attractions Las Vegas offered tourists from 1951, when above-ground testing resumed in the United States, until 1962, when it stopped.