The Mushroom Cloud Photograph: Preview of Digital Audio Workshop for SOHA Conference

Rachel Fermi holds the snapshot of the first atomic bomb explosion. Jack Aeby, photographer. Event date: July 16 1945, New Mexico. Family history meets History history: For the Digital Audio Workshop I’m teaching at the SOHA Conference, I will work from an interview with the granddaughter of the physicist who conducted the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Photographer Rachel Fermi talks about discovering a color snapshot of a mushroom cloud in a box of family photographs. That discovery led her to create (with co-author Esther Samra) a book-length photo essay of the Manhattan Project, called Picturing The Bomb.

Here’s a little foretaste of the audio we will work with at the workshop, which takes place in a week and a half in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles.

And yes, you can still register!!

Here are some photos from the interview (during the last days of 2010), and four short edited audio excerpts. 

Rachel Fermi holds a photograph of her grandfather, Enrico Fermi, and his brother, Giulio. Enrico's brother died in childhood, and Enrico dealt with his extreme grief by reading about physics. Foreground: photo of Enrico Fermi (right) and his brother Giulio in Rome, Italy. Background Rachel Fermi

In the FIRST AUDIO RECORDING [MP3, 1:07], Rachel describes the background—how she’s related to Enrico Fermi, and what she was told about him when she was young. (Although she was born in the United States, Rachel grew up in Cambridge, England.)

“I was told a little bit about my grandfather. I knew that he was a physicist, and I knew that he’d won a Nobel Prize. But as I was ...Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens on March 21, 2011 in • History • Photographs
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