CONTACT
Atomic Photographers Guild is an international collective of independent photographers dedicated to making visible all facets of the nuclear age. Founded in 1987 by Robert Del Tredici, Guild members focus on the atomic age to consider nuclear weapons and war; nuclear energy and medicine; extraction industries; transportation practices; and nuclear contamination and wastes.
Since its formation, the Guild has amassed an archive of photographic negatives and prints from more than forty photographers across seven decades. The collection begins in 1945 with the world’s first two atomic photographers, Berlyn Brixner (United States) and Yoshito Matsushige (Japan). Brixner was the head photographer of the first atomic bomb blast—known as the "Trinity Test”—in the Alamogordo desert of New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Three weeks later, Matsushige, a photojournalist and military photographer, was 2.7 kilometres away from the Hiroshima bomb’s hypocentre at the time of the atomic bomb's detonation. Despite his own trauma, he managed to take a handful of photographs and inadvertently became the only person to document the destruction of Hiroshima from inside that city on August 6, 1945.
In addition to the works of Brixner and Matsushige, the Guild’s founder, Robert Del Tredici, documented the destroyed Three Mile Island nuclear reactor TMI-2 in 1979, the United States’ nuclear weapons complex through the 1980s, uranium mining, nuclear waste sites and atomic survivors in Canada, the US, Japan and the former USSR. Other prominent Guild holdings include works by Carole Gallagher focused on the down-winders in southern Utah living under clouds of atomic fallout from the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s and early 60s (1993); works by Igor Kostin, the first photographer to document the Chernobyl disaster (2006); and works by David McMillan, who has extensively documented its aftermath (2019). Members work in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The Guild’s growing membership engages ethical, ecological, historical, and scientific dimensions of the nuclear era. Through exhibitions, publications, and lectures, Guild members actively disseminate their work, collectively assembling a picture of what could be our darkest, most enduring legacy.
INQUIRIES
Advisory Group
Jesse Andrewartha: [email protected]
Robert Del Tredici: [email protected]
Blake Fitzpatrick: [email protected]
Mary Kavanagh: [email protected]
elin o’Hara slavick: [email protected]
Image Use
© All rights reserved. Copyright is held by individual Atomic Photographers Guild members.
The Atomic Photographers Guild is not an agent of its member community. Permission to use images and/or text from the Atomic Photographers Guild website may be done by contacting photographers and/or authors directly. Contact information is available on individual Photographers Pages.
Research and Curatorial Inquiries
The Atomic Photographers Guild welcomes research and curatorial inquiries: [email protected]
