The Trinity Site is the location of the first ever nuclear bomb detonation on July 16, 1945. Its location is within the White Sands Missile range, an Army Base for testing weapons for the DOD. The site is open to visitors two times per year. By restricting the sites availability to civilians, it further heightens this landscape as spectacle. It does this by increasing the disassociation of humanity with the gravity of the site by distracting visitors with the speciality of the visit. A small obelisk sits in isolation surrounded by desert with little indication of the destructed and destructive landscape it once was. This case study helps to understand an approach to nuclear landscapes where their significance is heightened through restriction of access, yet as a result, the gravity of the site is also disguised by the spectacle of exclusiveness.
The approach utilized by Trinity Site in response to environmental memory is similar to the point of view of American photographer Peter Goin, who in his photographic book “Nuclear Landscapes” explores the nuclear context as a landscape of desolation and expansiveness, one where the human is a foreign object. In doing so, he describes these landscapes through pictorial symbolism, evoking the fear inherent in these terrains. Through his archive of images, the use of photographic techniques helps to symbolize the destruction that occurred on the land, but objectifies them as no longer attainable to the human civilian. Instead they are archived through imagery only, accessible only through the pages of a book. This form of documentation is one way in which the memory of nuclear landscape remains, perhaps due to the inherent danger of radioactive exposure, it is the only way these sites can remain in the consciousness of memory.
Left Top: www.wsmr.army.mil/fn/Pages/TrinityOpenHouse.aspx
Left Bottom: Google Earth Aerial, Trinity Site
Right Top: Randy Siner, The Salt lake Tribune
Right Bottom: US Dept of Energy/ National Atomic Museum