The Day After Trinity: J Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb / Voyager

Based on Jon Else’s remarkable eighty-eight minute film on the events leading up to and succeeding the explosion of the world’s first nuclear device at Trinity test site in New Mexico, "The Day After Trinity" features Elseês complete documentary in Quicktime video. Included are generous links to commentaries, photos, biographies, annotations, as well as glossary and search features. "The Day after Trinity" was nominated for an Academy Award for the best Documentary Feature. Combining rare archival footage with intimate interviews of an extraordinary scientific elite, "The Day after Trinity" achieves an emotional force and focus which no other work on the subject even approaches. "The Day after Trinity" contains eighty-eight minutes of Quick Time video. A real time running commentary by the director John Else, Michael Renav, and cultural critic B. Ruby Rich."The Day after Trinity" also contains a dossier from the declassified files of the Manhattan Project, the FBI, and scientific community. The CD-ROM contains a photo gallery of almost one hundred images and complete working transcripts, biographical notes on everyone who appears in the film, and a glossary.


Else originally set out to do a biography of John Oppenheimer, but as he read more and more on the topic of the atom bomb and Oppenheimer’s life, the territory of the film expanded. Not only about Oppenheimer, but all the history of western civilization during that time. From Los Alamos to the broad industry of the Manhattan Project. Great detail went into describing the McCarthy Era, nuclear paranoia in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. Else realized he had to limit what the story was to be about. He decided to use Oppenheimer as the prism in defining the nuclear age in which we live. He made a personal decision to talk about Robert Oppenheimer’s life insofar that it had something to do with his public legacy. As the film became shorter, very complex chunks of Oppenheimer’s life had to condense from 20 minutes of screen time to one minute of screen time. It was extraordinarily difficult to make a story clear in 90 minutes. Within the film a description of Los Alamos strikes my heart, since I was raised on an Air Force Base (McGuire Air Force Base). Los Alamos was a small community, but by 1944 it became a walled city of 6,000 people of which Oppenheimer was in charge. Oppenheimer knew and understood everything that went on in the laboratories, whether chemistry or theoretical physics, or machine shop. He could keep it all in his head and coordinate it. It was clear that he was extremely gifted. The most striking contradiction of his life was the fact that such a great scholar who was fond of metaphysical poetry should become such a great administrator dedicated to producing the Atomic Bomb.


Truths and Fictions: A Journey From Documentary to Digital/ Pedro Meyer

Pedro Meyer, a documentarian, whose photographs are exhibited in museums around the world, uses digital manipulation to amplify social commentary. His biting satire and irony go beyond the boundaries of photography in the sense that Meyer questions what kind of truth and reality is represented in digitally manipulated photography. For the past several years, legendary Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer has been using powerful software to extend his artistic vision. In 1994, on the eve of his opening exhibition of Truths and Fictions:A Journey From Documentary to Digital at The Mexican Museum in San Francisco, Meyer states:


In the past, if I think back onto how people responded to my photographs, I was always sort of like a glorified button pusher who happened to be lucky to get an image. Giving me credit for having an intention in my work was not foremost in people’s minds.Today, when people go to an exhibition of mine, they immediately think, Now what did this guy want to do here?’ My stature as an artist has grown, because now people concede that there might be some intent behind my work...-Pedro Meyer, The Mexican Museum, San Francisco


Pedro Meyer’s use of computer tools is so subtle and controlled that the altered images in the show are indistinguishable from their unaltered counterparts. Although image manipulation has been around since the early days of photography, many viewers choose to believe that his photographs are the unvarnished truth--and that an altered photograph is somehow less true.


Although Meyer is considered a world class artist he states in "Truths and Fictions" that the shift to digital techniques was met with considerable resistance within the fine-art community. He states "When you talk about the fine-art establishment, it’s not one homogeneous package. The museum-curator institutional infrastructure is incredibly conservative by nature." He also states that he found the more traditional persons in the art world just didn’t know how to deal with the issues. These same criticisms that condescendingly tagged photography a "craft" rather than an art form for decades are now being directed toward digital art. Meyer questions this condescension:


"Photography was dismissed as being mechanical, and you’ll hear that same charge today against computers. I think people are scared of anything that implies a big change. Everybody has a sense, an intuition that there will be a major upheaval-- a cultural, economic and technical upheaval that goes well beyond art." Although Meyer’s work in "Truths and Fictions" forces viewers to confront questions that go well beyond art it re-establishes our concepts and notions about art and reality. He successfully combines narration, over 100 images, Quicktime Video, music, bilingual text, animation and drawings.


He also created a CD-ROM entitled "I Photograph to Remember" produced by Voyager. This compilation of almost 100 images whether color or black and white coupled with bilingual narration is a moving documentary, an extraordinary collection of photographs, a personal reflection and a recounting of the passion and commitment uniting a family.

© Copyright 1997 Denise Urban