America Ground Zero. - book reviews

Afterimage, Nov, 1994 by David L. Jacobs

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.