



1 / 12 Chevron Chevron Photograph © Nadav Kander, Courtesy Flowers Gallery “Kurchatov V (Heating Plant), Kazakhstan,” 2011.

Little Boy, the atomic bomb delivered onto the Japanese city of Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, gave birth to a new era of ruination in human consciousness. According to eyewitness accounts, when the bomb detonated, its heat flash incinerated birds in mid-air. Writing in his magisterial “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,”_ _Richard Rhodes coined this memorable image: “The fireball flashed an enormous photograph of the city at the instant of its immolation fixed on the animal, vegetable and mineral surfaces of the city itself.” Thus ladders left their shadows on the steel of storage tanks, leaves left silhouettes on wooden telegraph poles, and, farther away, the darker patterns on some victims’ clothing were burned out, while the lighter ones were not, so creating an unearthly decoupage. Farther still from the epicenter, the flash caused a sunburn-like pigmentation on human skins, and, where a hand had been raised in a pathetic attempt to ward off what its creator, Robert Oppenheimer, described (borrowing from the Bhagavad Gita) as the light of “ten thousand suns,” it left its own shape on its owner. So distinctive was this marking that it became known as “the mask of Hiroshima.”

Since that day, we have all worn the mask of Hiroshima—and everywhere we look through it we see birds burst into flame in mid-air. Of course, ruination was nothing new, nor the destruction of entire cities. The instigator of the Second World War, the frustrated watercolorist Adolf Hitler, had aimed both to inflict this on his enemies and to preserve his own Thousand-Year Reich from the possibility of such ruination by ordering all new public buildings to be constructed solely in brick and stone. As it transpired, it was German and Japanese cities that were subjected to wholesale destruction by aerial bombardment. But Hiroshima was a different sort of cataclysm—the technological application of a new scientific understanding of the nature of reality itself. Indeed, once Einstein had published his papers on general relativity, some forty years earlier, the razing of either this city or another of comparable size was arguably a foregone conclusion.

In many cultures, people know that all things must perish, that civilizations arise and civilizations decline, that progress—one might paradoxically say—is for the birds. But in the West the need to deny this psychological reality has led to a strange form of neurosis. On the one hand, there is the ceaseless proliferation of what the architect Rem Koolhaas has memorably described as “junk space”: buildings that enshrine nothingness and the ephemeral in the reflective glass of seeming permanence, structures of a size and apparent solidity inconceivable to the ancients, but which have a specification far shorter than that of the traditional domestic housing surrounding them. On the other hand, among contemporary city dwellers there is an unwillingness, verging on phobia, to contemplate the ruination of the recent past. Of course, I’m aware that there are now organized tours to such contemporary Babylons as Detroit and Pripyat (the Ukrainian city abandoned during the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor), but once such sites become tourist destinations their significance is subsumed to commercial exploitation. In an important sense, they are no longer places, if by place we mean a unique location, but rather they are fungible—exchangeable on the global market for others that consumer demand deems to have a similar value. As for the imagery associated with modern ruins, there is such a lot of it—and it, too, proliferates so relentlessly throughout our millions of digital cameras—that we must conceive of it as precisely that city-size photograph “taken” of Hiroshima by Little Boy’s fireball at the very instant of the city’s destruction.

We are, as I say, prepared to look upon this evidence of our civilization’s transitory nature, but only within a context defined by the permanent present of consumerist desire. We wander the streets of our cities, accepting the presence of their decay only as a desirable condition of their even more desirable “renewal.” What we cannot cope with is the slow seepage of entropy, the winding down of our world, its sifting through our psyches—fine as silica, poisonous as asbestos—and its dusty consummation. Nadav Kander’s images in “Dust,” which show the ruins of cities that once served as sites of nuclear testing along the Russia-Kazakhstan border, don’t rub our faces in this friability—they allow us to cup it in our hands and bring it up to our lips. These are not marketable souvenirs of a pseudo-apotheosis but that apotheosis itself: the loss of the innocent belief in our manifest destiny to expand our civilization to the stars and convert the heathen alien; the dwindling away of our ambition to terraform our own planet into a more usable version of itself. To aestheticize such matters would be problematic, but these images do not make beautiful what is not; they ask of us that we repurpose ourselves to accept a new order of both the beautiful and the real.

The Argentinean fabulist Jorge Luis Borges wrote a fragment called “On Exactitude in Science,” which describes a civilization that held the science of cartography in such regard that it created a map of the empire which was the same size as the empire itself—a map entirely coextensive with what it depicts, point for point. Borges tells us that subsequent generations did not value cartography so highly, and the map was neglected and so disintegrated: “In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.”

Nadav Kander’s “Dust” is just such a relic of the disciplines of geography, and, as for us, we are the animals and beggars that inhabit it. But I ask you which you would prefer, to live uncomfortably in such shreds or to be portrayed forever wearing the mask of Hiroshima in a never-ending Now fixed by the light of ten thousand digital suns?

This piece was drawn from Nadav Kander’s “Dust,” which was published in 2014 by Hatje Cantz. An exhibition of the work opens April 7th at Flowers Gallery, in New York City.