America Ground Zero.

In the summer of 1953 Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams spent three weeks documenting a remote corner of southwestern Utah. They photographed mountains, farmhouses, people, produce, and road signs, but overlooked the wind. These old friends with very different approaches to photography hoped to merge their landscape and documentary skills into a uniquely well-rounded photo essay. Life magazine was intrigued with the notion and after a good deal of editing, and more than a little bickering, Life published "Three Mormon Towns" in 1954. Adams and Lange felt that the editing had distorted some aspects of the towns of Gunlock, St. George, and Toquerville in particular, but they agreed to publish their work in accordance with Life's editorial suggestions. The essays and even more so the dozens images that the Life editors discarded from Adams's and Lange's original layout, combine a Jeffersonian agrarianism with a Church-dominated sense of family and community. Punctuated with Life's patented sentimentality, "Three Mormon Towns" identifies southwestern Utah as a heartland, in all senses of the word.(1)

A different story had literally been carried in the wind ever since January 1951, when the first of 126 atomic bombs was detonated in Nevada, a couple of hundred miles west of these three Utah towns. Many of their citizens worked at or near the detonation site, and everyone in the area knew of the explosions--they had seen the flashes and heard windows rattling and breaking. Some had seen livestock die, and many had felt the effects of radiation on their own bodies including severe "sunbum," nausea, and sore throats. Yet this story is wholly absent from the Life essay. As best as I can recall from having studied the Lange-Adams notebooks and correspondence several years ago, there were no references to the testing.(2) There are various ways to explain this telling absence, this absence of telling. Adams and Lange may not have been in Utah long enough to gain enough trust for the people to share their experiences. The Mormons of Southern Utah were naturally reticent, and the Church did little to discourage skepticism and suspicion of outsiders. These were tough, close-mouthed, taciturn westerners. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) had consistently assured them that their symptoms were temporary and there would be no permanent damage. Like most of the lay population, they didn't know much about radiation and its effects, and, despite the publicized destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they accepted this benign view. In the aftermath of World War II and in the context of the escalating rhetoric of the Cold War, the Mormons trusted that the government had their best interests in mind, As one Utahn explains it in Carole Gallagher's American Ground Zero (1993):

Not only do you have [Mormons] saying that they are the one true church and that they have a monopoly on the truth, but it's part of their doctrine that the American government was part of God's divine plan! All this is background as to why it was so easy to conduct testing here for so many years and not have people make a fuss about it. A divinely inspired government doesn't poison its own people.

In large measure, Adams and Lange found the Utah that they (and the editors of Life) were looking for: close-knit, God-fearing, conservative towns where people were bound together by patriotism, a developed work ethic, the Mormon Church, and a beautiful but inhospitable landscape. Some 30 years later, Gallagher, a New York City photographer, went to Utah "to research, investigate, contemplate, and document the effects of nuclear testing on the land and on [its] people. . . ." There were significant cultural differences between herself and the citizens of southern Utah that needed to be bridged before the subjects of America Ground Zero could bare their souls and their stories to the tape recorder and the camera. Accordingly, Gallagher purposefully attempted to suspend many of her East Coast ways in order "to become a blank slate upon which the stories and images could be written." She lived and worked within the community for several years, gained the confidence and trust of the people, and came to know at close range the horrors of nuclear poisoning in ways that carried her far beyond even the extensive research she had conducted back east. Ten years later Gallagher has emerged with an enormous book, American Ground Zero, that succeeds like few others in uniting photography and oral history.

There is no mistaking the resonance of photography born of long contact with its subjects, however much we are urged to think that photographers can approximate the essence of a place in a few days, shooting on the fly. W. Eugene Smith is one of many who have recognized the primacy of knowledge gained through ongoing contact with the photographer's subjects. Even the two months Smith spent with Albert Schweitzer in Lambarene, West Africa, in 1954--a virtual eternity for an on-site assignment--did not fend off the frustration he felt at being able to glimpse and photographically capture only the surfaces. Adams and Lange, too, fell short in their Utah project, despite their stay of three weeks. Soon after Life published the essay, Adams wrote to Lange that ". . . the Mormon story turned out very sour indeed; a very inadequate presentation which did no good to the Mormons, to photography, and to either of us."(3) Gallagher lived in the desert, a displaced New Yorker amid the Mormons, and the understanding she came to have of their lives, and the events of the 1950s that changed them, emerges with equal measures of precision and pain from the testimonies she recorded and the photographs she made of these people.

Gallagher has shaped an immense amount of material into a coherent book of over 400 pages. There are 70 oral histories, selected from hundreds of interviews, "to represent most kinds of radiogenic health effects . . . and as many different life situations and political points of view as possible." Much is gained through this diverse cross-section of rural Utah--marines, housewives, ranch hands, adults who were then small children, employees in the shops and restaurants of the downwind towns, scientists, a minister, and a madam.

Each of the oral histories begins with a black and white photograph, followed by edited interviews or recollections. Gallagher, like Lange, often positions the camera below the subject's face, enhancing a sense of stature and dignity, and nearly all the subjects look completely at ease in front of the camera. While Gallagher doesn't reveal much about how the photographs were made, the subjects seem to have been active participants in choosing the scenes, as well as the poses, gestures, and props that are included in the pictures. Colonel Langford Harrison, a pilot who collected samples directly from the mushroom clouds, is pictured standing in the cockpit of an airplane, while Rex Tomlinson, a former mercenary and worker on the Nevada site, reclines on his bed surrounded by several rifles. But for the most part people are photographed in an easy chair or on a porch or in their yard, peering back at us or off into the distance. They are handsome, well-lit scenes that never emphasize, and often completely suppress, the signs of physical damage or deterioration of their inhabitants. Alden Roberts, for example, a father of seven and former schoolteacher, has undergone many operations to treat multiple cancers and related ailments. The image of him staring directly into the camera, dressed in a crisply ironed shirt, reveals only the deformities in his face. Gallagher writes of this portrait:

One could never be sensitive enough in the delicate situation of asking to photograph a man whose cancer had so obviously eaten him alive, leaving an arm hanging uselessly at his side and his face reduced by a third . . . He was gracious in granting my request for an image of himself. In forsaking every opportunistic rule of macho photojournalism, I hope I have given him back a portrait that is as generous, if sad, as he is.

In several photographs the subject presents a photograph made during the 1950s taken from a family album. Robert Carter, for example, holds a large 1957 print of his platoon of soldiers, hands over their eyes, moments before a detonation. Many of these pictures within pictures are of deceased parents, spouses, or children. Isaac Nelson holds a framed picture of his long-dead wife, taken some 20 years earlier. Martha Laird, framed on either side by two stag heads hanging from hooks, holds a picture of her children in front of a schoolhouse in one hand and a snapshot of an oncoming fallout cloud in the other. Most harrowing, a mother and daughter stand in front of a picture of their husband and father, blown up to twice life size to reveal the advanced tumor that had replaced most of his neck. These images reinforce the changes, born in experience and on the winds, that the intervening years have wrought, the befores and afters of naivete and disillusionment.

Gallagher strategically places several Lange photographs of Utah throughout American Ground Zero. (Curiously, she does not include, or even mention, any of the pictures that Adams made with Lange in 1953.) In a brief interlude entitled "Downwind: 'A Low-Use Segment of the Population,'" two photographs give eloquent testimony to the people who were there at the time. In the first the camera is positioned inside a small Mormon chapel looking back toward the door. The first two rows of pews are empty, but the last few are full of well-groomed parishioners, singing from hymn books. In the background a large man, also singing, stands in an open doorway, eyes downcast, holding a young boy dose to him, while extremely bright light floods through from outside. The other image depicts the immaculate main street of St. George as a bright ribbon punctuated with a handful of cars and the roofs of buildings, with mountains and mesas silhouetted in the distance. It is a serene, prelapsarian scene of a small community nestled amid an enormous landscape. Like many of the photographs-within-photographs that Gallagher uses, the dozen or so vintage images by Lange emphasize in subtle ways the loss of innocence that is one of the book's major themes.

In the oral histories Gallagher occasionally interjects contextual information or her own thoughts, but for the most part she wisely lets the people speak of their own experiences. The histories usually begin with recollections of the speaker's first memory of a nuclear test. Many felt as though they were privileged to be witnessing history, and, having been assured by the government that there was no danger, they clamored up hills and mountains to witness the flash and the mushroom cloud, "to participate in a moment in history." Many initially found the clouds beautiful. But hours or days later they experienced the first signs of radiation poisoning--the inexplicable "sunburn," rashes, open sores, nausea, nosebleeds, and sudden loss of hair. Several recall going to doctors who assured them that there was nothing to worry about and who told their patients, especially women, that their condition had its basis in mental rather than physical ailments. Some months or years later, the more catastrophic effects manifested themselves: thyroid conditions, deformed babies, sterility, leukemia, and other cancers in people only in their thirties or forties--horrific stories of illnesses that raged sometimes for decades. The genetic damage, of course, is still being evidenced.

How did these people set about knowing and comprehending these events? How did they grapple with phenomena that were entirely without precedent? How were they to categorize the mushroom clouds, the blinding light, the shaking earth, the surreal pink clouds floating above their homes and schools? How to grasp the destructive force? In the moment of encountering the explosions these witnesses testify, in their various ways, to the first step in their movement from innocence to experience. Herbert Holmes, who flew with the Strategic Air Command recalls:

Before bombs away, we were instructed to black out the bombers like a dungeon . . . we put a little nylon pillow, four inches thick, about a foot square, over our shut eyes. At bombs away it was brighter than any sun, you couldn't imagine how bright it was in there, just startles you. I could see the bones in my fingers through my closed eyelids and the pillow! One of the eeriest things that ever happened in my life. Ghostly, really. You don't believe what you're lookin' at.

Judith Neilson, a child then, remembers ". . . the earth shaking very hard, five or six in the morning. It would shake everything. Our dishes would rattle, everything would vibrate. We were down in the basement, and you could feel it, it would practically throw you out of bed. As if somebody just came up and shook you good and hard."

And Diane Nielson, then a toddler, recalls that "After a bomb, there it would be, the fallout, fine like flour, kind of grayish white. We would play like that was our snow . . . and write our names in it . . . It would burn your fingers . . ."

Others attest to the depression that set in soon after the explosion. Robert Merton, a marine from Camp Pendleton, who witnessed an explosion in a trench 3500 yards from ground zero noted:

[The trench is] like a grave, is what it is, just one L-O-N-G grave. At the point of detonation, I could feel the heat, felt [sic] like someone had run a hot iron over the whole of my body, and I could see the bones in my elbow. I'm looking with my eyes shut, and it was just as clear as could be.

When asked, later in the interview, about the feeling in the camp that night among the soldiers, Merton said "Complete deflation of spirit, and I mean to a man. You didn't want to talk to anybody. There was no joy associated with the experience whatsoever. No talking, no nothing. I just want [sic] to be with my own thoughts." Another soldier, Robert Carter, remarked:

I was happy, full of life before I saw that bomb, but then I understood evil and was never the same . . . The explosion went off, and I remember feeling the confusion that just blew me, it just blew me forty feet into the mountainside and all these men with me. I felt elbows, I felt knees, I felt heads banging, I felt my head hit the ground. I felt dirt in my ears, my nose, it went down my throat . . . I remember the ground so hot that I couldn't stand on it, and I was just burning alive. I felt like I was being cooked.

Again and again, these witnesses speak of the immediate change that the experience of the atomic bomb produced, as well as the slower process of grappling with the consequences for their own lives, their families, their belief systems, and their efforts to comprehend a world that mandates the creation of death machines. Several speak with considerable bitterness about how they were expendable in the eyes of the government, a government that had decided to detonate explosions only when they felt assured that the winds were blowing in an easterly direction--toward Utah--and away from the large population centers of Las Vegas and Los Angeles, Preston Jay Truman recollects:

It was very confusing because on the one hand there were statements by Linus Pauling about the possible harmful effects of fallout . . . I think the most difficult thing for people was the fact that they knew on a personal level, a visual level by going to the church and the cemetery for leukemia cases and others, they knew something wasn't right. In order to accept that, they also had to accept that the government not only did it to them, but was carrying on an extensive con job to show them there was no danger. How do you admit your government is lying to you and is putting you on the receiving end of discretionary genocide?

They single out "satanic bureaucrats fleecing the taxpayers," and the "general public that sits back, the silent majority," and speak of their lost trust in government, in the church, in life itself. Augusta Peters, her body ravaged by cancer, sounds a phrase that becomes a leitmotif:

I tell you, I know less than I ever knew. I've got more questions about everything. It's been so depressing, I would die if I could, I'd commit suicide but I'm afraid I'd make a mess out of it and be worse off. But really, I don't think one should have to live every day just getting ready to cry. I can hardly believe there is a great God. But it's a life. It's a mystery.

Adams and Lange approached the Mormons without much thought about the nuclear poison in the bones of the citizens of Gunlock, St. George, and Toquerville--poison that they, too, were subjected to as they photographed, breathed, ate, and drank during those weeks in 1953. Three decades later, Gallagher returned, armed with different expectations, and with considerably fewer illusions about the deadliness of the radiation, to say nothing of the role that the U.S. government has played in using these people, as the victims often put it, "like guinea pigs." Gallagher, too, photographed the beauty that Adams and Lange discovered in the landscape, but with the palpable irony born of knowing the lethal contents within these scapes. Both bodies of work signify the dignity of these people: in 1953, it was born of a long history of the so-called pioneer spirit, carving out their niche from a tough environment; in the 1980s, it came from having witnessed and felt at first hand the horrors and legacy of radiation poisoning, as well as the betrayals of the government, the medical community, and the Church itself.

Jay Truman, born in 1951, and witness to the bombs and their aftermath throughout his childhood, sums up the experience of Gallaghers subjects:

I think it's very important to realize about the downwind residents that these are not isolated personal tragedies. They are a cultural tragedy, a part of everyday life. We've all lost loved ones, friends, and we've all been lied to and . . . [considered] expendable. Everyone says a nuclear war is impossible. The downwind residents, the atomic veterans, the Test Site workers, we are the casualties of the Cold War, the casualties of the opening round of World War Ill. I think we always stand by looking into the endless graves of the not-yet-dead. It's like some graffiti I saw sprayed on a rock, 'When the big one comes, our long nightmare will be over and yours has only begun' . . . I remember in school they showed a film once called A is for Atom, B is for Bomb. I think most of us who grew up in that period, we've all in our own minds added C is for Cancer, D is for Death. I think that's what I see for the future.

NOTES

1. For more on this collaboration see David L. Jacobs, "Three Mormon Towns," exposure, vol.25, no.2, (1987), pp. 5-25.

2. Dorothea Lange did make one photograph that attests to how the Nevada testing was rationalized in Cold War terms. She photographed two newspaper dispensing machines, with the Desert News bearing the headline, "Russ H-Bomb Affirmed," while above it, the headline of the Salt Lake City Tribune reads, "Congress Members Demand Stronger A-Bomb Defense." The photograph did not appear in the Life essay, but is reproduced in America Ground Zero, p. 208.

3. Ansel Adams to Dorothea Lange, October 25, 1954, Ansel Adams Archive, Center for Creative Photography; quoted in Jacobs, p. 23.

DAVID L. JACOBS is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art, University of Houston.