Photographs link the nuclear past and nuclear present, shaping the public’s perception of events. What can they reveal about Canada’s nuclear footprint?

The Bomb in the Wilderness contends that photography is central to how we have represented, interpreted, and remembered nuclear activities since 1945. During the Second World War, Canada was a member of the Manhattan Project, the consortium that developed the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The impact and global reach of Canada’s nuclear programs has been felt ever since. But do photographs alert viewers to nuclear threat, numb them to its dangers, or by some strange calculus accomplish both?

John O’Brian’s wide-ranging and personal account of the nuclear era presents and discusses more than a hundred photographs, ranging from military images to the atomic ephemera of consumer culture. We need this fascinating analysis, to ensure that we do not look away.

John O'Brian teraches Art History at the University of British Columbia. He is author of David Milne and the Modern Tradition of Painting: The Flat Side of the Landscape and Degas to Matisse: The Maurice Wetheim Collection, and editor of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism.

John O'Brian's profile page

• Commended, The Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design: Prose Illustrated

O’Brian’s history of Canada’s involvement in the nuclear story forms an eye-opening reminder that, however we perceive the world, our individual view is never the whole picture.

University of Toronto Quarterly

Employing an accessible yet scholarly approach, O'Brian does scholars of environmental, nuclear, and Cold War-era visual culture a great service as he brings together images and ideas in an interconnected web of analysis that complicates the chronological narrative of events, [showing] us that photography may either alert us to nuclear risk or numb us to its dangers.

BC Studies

Art historian O’Brian has brought together all his powers of observation and perception to help us rethink how we view the history and the mystery of the bomb.

The Ormsby Review