Atomic, 2025
Ink on paper
60cm x 80cm x 5cm
Bomb, 2025
Ink on paper
60cm x 80cm x 5cm
This work centers on the first two photographs ever taken of the first atomic bomb detonation. The images are not reproduced through traditional painting or printmaking, but rather entirely rendered using stamps. The left panel is filled with the repeated word “Atomic,” and the right with “Bomb.”
The source images, originally captured by Harold Edgerton during the Manhattan Project, remained classified until 2003 due to the possibility of reverse-engineering critical explosion data through frame analysis and exposure timing. These hauntingly enigmatic images are as strange as they are mesmerizing. In 1945, the ability to capture such photographs was as technologically advanced as the bomb itself. The right-hand image in particular was taken just one millionth of a second after detonation. One can see the bomb chamber illuminated by radiation, plasma energy bleeding into the surrounding space—what follows in the next frame is a rapidly expanding, fur-covered blur of light and heat.
To recreate these images, the artist make two custom stamps, one “Atomic,” the other “Bomb.” Through an almost ascetic process, the artist became a human printing machine—repeating the same motion relentlessly, word by word, to reconstruct the historical photographs. The densely layered typography echoes the original grain of the source images, riddled with noise and distortion caused by technological limits and radiation interference.
At first glance, the diptych appears as an abstract, indecipherable visual field. Only as viewers draw closer—curious, attentive—do they begin to recognize the surface as densely packed with just two words: Atomic and Bomb.
