Art and the Atom
Peter Shellenberger — a depict artist — talks about nuclear art, radioactive tupperware and roller-skating girls
A luminescent disc is at the back of Peter Shellenberger’s prints, a large coin that recalls the sun. But the glow is oddly-colored and disconcerting. It levels and obliterates the features of the foreground object, defining it only in the starkest outer lines, making it familiar and strange at the same time. — Tom Zoellner, author of ‘Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock that Shaped the World’
Peter Shellenberger is an unusual artist. Rather than acrylic and oil on canvas, or Photoshop and data algorithms, Peter’s primary ‘paint’ is radiation. Browsing some garage sales a few years ago, he came across some solid-color dishware first sold in the 1930s under the name Fiesta Ware. Fiesta Ware was stained by a dye agent containing uranium, which emits the low radioactive signature used to expose his images. I sat down with him to talk about his artwork, the Cracker Jack toys that are his subjects, and how we still feel the effects of the nuclear age. Here’s how Peter describes what he does:
Peter: There are two bodies of work that I am currently pursuing. The first draws from the history of science and photography as well as from knowledge I’ve gained from years of going to flea markets and garage sales. Over time I learned that the red-orange glaze made from Fiestaware in the 1930s and 1940s was created using uranium oxide, the same kind of uranium later used to make the atomic bomb. The uranium remains radioactive in the dinnerware today.
I cover unexposed film with the Fiestaware and, after about two years of experimenting with different kinds of film, lengths of exposure, and objects that will make silhouettes (I chose Cracker Jack toys from the same era as the Fiestaware), I succeeded in making a series of glowing purple “nuclear” prints.
Ben: Tom Zoellner, who I quoted above, has already written an amazing commentary on your work, framing it against the Curies and Becquerel, the twin shadows of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the hundreds of nuclear plants that now power our world. I want to start with the art itself, though. Why don’t you start off by telling me what’s happening in “Roller Skating Girl”?
Peter: The rollerskating girl? I see her as a character skating along through atomic oblivion.
Ben: Atomic oblivion? Like, a nuclear wasteland?
Peter: More being oblivious than in oblivion. I would say being oblivious is her connection…maybe she is a bit like an innocent japanese spirit character, maybe she’s a bit like us. In the case of our relationship with attempting to control the atom, we’re the rollerskating girl; blithe, oblivious in front of awesome power.
Ben: You were telling me before that the subjects are all Cracker Jack toys. What inspired you to use the roller skating girl out of all the different characters?
Peter: Maybe it unknowingly came from the dire straits song:
The song seems a little sexist now, but there’s something about her being oblivious to everything around her as she skates away. I would say she’s innocent, but at the same time — as the subject lit by the nuclear glow — there’s a degree to which she’s the “all-knowing” one in the scene, and her presence there forces a question.
Ben: I can see that. Exposed as a silhouette against the background radiation, there’s definitely a way in which she’s related to it, yet oblivious. How long did it take you to get the effect that you wanted?
Peter: The aesthetic results you can see in “roller-skating girl” actually took two years of experimenting with various materials and exposures. One constant was my using daylight color transparency film and a Fiesta Ware custard bowl in “red”. I learned about its radioactivity from a few different sources, but I couldn’t tell you why I suddenly decided to make art with radioactive pottery.
One day I put a bowl in a light-tight box with a sheet of film over it. I left it for two weeks, and after processing the film I saw a purple circle. I had made an image. A photograph is defined by using light, but I was not using light. I looked into patenting the process, and it already had a name. What I make are called ‘autoradiographs’. There was something magic here that at the time I didn’t understand, and so I began educating myself. Over the next two years I used different materials and learned more and more about radiation’s quirks and possibilities. I tried paper, metal, movie film strip, metal and plastic. The paper would disappear completely in the exposure — the radiation going right through it. The metal was too dense; the movie film strips would kind of look like x-rays. Plastic, and the cracker jack toys specifically seemed to have potential.
Eventually, after experimenting with many lengths of exposure, I settled on 45 days. Just enough radiation made its way through the plastic, and it looked otherworldly — important — to me. It was something other than light. This was my aesthetic goal, to have it look like an image made with radiation. The bright purple color I considered at the time to be the actual color of radiation, but I realized that what I was seeing was film balanced for daylight being influenced by a completely different spectrum. The radiation was just wreaking havoc on the dye structure within the film, and purple was its resulted mash-up.
Ben: Yep, I was wondering if you’d picked purple, or if it had been an accident.
Peter: I do consider the purple color to be akin to the color of tree frogs…
Ben: Err…
Peter: Anyway, as I worked to produce images with crackerjack toys that would somehow conceptually resonate with various aspects of radiation, there were three things I learned about the Fiesta Ware that became relevant. First, that it was uranium that was the radioactive agent used in the glaze of the Fiesta Ware bowl. Second, that the uranium used in making the “red” Fiesta Ware was eventually confiscated from the company, and third, that when it was confiscated it went directly into the first atomic bombs.
Ben: Holy Toledo!
Peter: Yes.
Ben: So weird to think that it went straight from American dinner tables into the core of a bomb.
Peter: Just as interesting for me, I realised that the way I was making my images was itself a direct ‘copy’ of Becquerel’s discovery of radiation in the early 1900s. The process I had gone through, and the objects I was using, had taken me from the origin of man’s conscious relationship with radiation, right through to the first atomic bomb.
Ben: Kind of a crazy realization?
Peter: Everything I had done was backwards, right down to the exposures. I made my first image at two weeks, and was able to achieve a signature at as little as two days — 45 days became a purely aesthetic decision. Personal exposure for my work, and a constant stream of relevant connections ensued. One was learning of James Acord, my hero who unfortunately died before I had a chance to seek him out and have beers with him.
Ben: You said at the beginning that you had two bodies of work. Are they related?
Peter: Yes, the second body of work also experiments with an alternative way of making a photograph. For these I set up a large format camera, wait for it to get dark, open the exposure, and “make” the photograph by setting off very powerful flash bulbs. I wanted to call into question the common assumption that photographs are made ‘instantaneously” and these large format, black and white prints capture mysterious, almost ethereal night-scene images. These photographs were influenced by the mysterious experiments of Nikola Tesla.
Ben: I can’t wait to take a look. Thanks for sharing all this with us Peter, any final thoughts before we sign off?
Peter: I think that about covers it. I have a couple pieces cooking at two years exposure, and I am attempting to do some work out in the field as well, but we’ll leave that for next time.
Peter Shellenberger is a photographer currently residing in Brunswick, ME. Most recently, his work was included in Both Sides of the Camera: Photographs from the Collection of Judith Ellis Glickman at the Portland Museum of Art and You Can’t See This: Photographs at the Limits of Visibility curated by Meggan Gould for the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. You can see ‘Roller Skating Girl’ here, and explore more of his work by signing up at depict.com
Peter has said the Cracker Jack images of children at play are a recollection of the photographic shadows of people against the walls of Hiroshima, caught at the moment of their annihilation. Shellenberger tells us that what is most worthy of introspection is not what uranium does on its own account, but what it illuminates about our own human shapes. — Tom Zoellner
