Harold's Edgerton's Rapatronic photographs of atomic tests

Abstract

At first it looks like a nectarine, left to rot at the back of the refrigerator until it has half-sunk into the shelf (figure 1). It has some of the peach gloss and fuzz of a fruit and a fruit's liquid softness. There is a scar on the left where the stem once was. But then something goes wrong with the simile. Those spots on the surface are more like a constellation of stars showing through thin clouds than the first signs of mould. Those clouds of pale light that play across the surface, more like gauze curtains in a night breeze than the mottled colors of a fruit. Or more like washes ofpaint on damp watercolor paper. Or more like the fused surfaces inside an opal. That torn patch at the left, more like brain tissue than fruit pulp. And not like a brain exposed by careful sawing of the skull, but like a fleshy tumor, slowly liquefying the surrounding tissues. Or a weeping sore. Or water seething in a tide pool. The longer I look, the wilder the similes become.

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