There’s a small exhibit of photographs at Peter Blum from atomic bomb tests the United States conducted in the 1940’s and 1950’s.  Only one photograph captures the low, geometric mushroom shape we’re used to seeing.  Instead the clouds here evoke, dreamily, a flying saucer, a jellyfish, a foam, a flower, a head of cauliflower.  Some are slender plumes, as high as 700 feet, that drift in one direction like trees bending towards sunlight.

Set in the Nevada desert and on small islands of the Pacific, the images are powerfully abstract.  Even in those scenarios that incorporate traces of life – palm trees, beach shacks, rock formations, spectators with dark shades sitting in rows of fold-out chairs – the scale of the explosions is surreal.  The US continued test explosions through the early 1960’s, long after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Some of the government photos here have been retouched with white paint to make the clouds more shapely, more palatable.  Taken by the scientists, the press, and by civilians, all the photos on display are of a piece: they capture the strangeness and enormity of the moment.