The poster for the new production of Louis Slotin Sonata in Chicago. . .
I have to say…
I like it.
I like it very much.
Eye-witness accounts of atomic blasts invariably share some sentiment to the effect that the explosion’s aftermath easily rates as the most beautiful and simultaneously horrible sight the witness has ever seen. Richard Rhodes collects page after amazing page of first-hand reports from the test shot at Trinity in his seminal history, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Here’s just one from J. Robert Oppenheimer’s brother Frank:
And so there was this sense of this ominous cloud hanging over us. It was so brilliant purple with all the radioactive glowing. And it just seemed to hang there forever. Of course it didn’t. It must have been just a very short time until it went up. It was very terrifying.
And the thunder from the blast. It bounced on the rocks, and then it went—I don’t know where else it bounced. But it never seemed to stop. Not like an ordinary echo with thunder. It just kept echoing back and forth in that Jornada del Meurto.
By cropping the mushroom cloud neatly by half, the designer has de-iconized the image, forcing us to look again more closely at the amazing, disturbing forms and colors, not to mention the cloud’s sheer enormity.
Posters are for putting butts in seats. I have no idea if this will do that. But I could stare at it all day.
May human eyes never witness such beauty again.
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