MICROBLOGS

Picturing the Atom: How Images Expose the Myth of a Global Visual Nuclear History

By Maria Rentetzi, Professor, Chair of Science, Technology & Gender Studies at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany

While preparing my recent exhibition on the history of radiation protection, entitled Living with Radiation, I became aware of an astonishingly rich paper and digital trail of photographs documenting the development of nuclear science and industry. (For a visual history of radiation protection, see https://cleio-press.de/). Yet, these images overwhelmingly represent the history of the nuclear age from the perspective of the Global North, perpetuating a particular historiographical lens on regions long described as the “developing world.” For decades, historians have used images as sources of historical knowledge—often as supplements or correctives to textual records. Photographs have been mobilized to substantiate historical claims, to enrich biographical and autobiographical accounts, and to complement oral histories. For “text-heavy” historians, images have traditionally held value only insofar as they reinforced established narratives. However, the recent visual turn in historical scholarship has elevated images to a different epistemological and historiographical status. Images can function as a distinct language, one that allows historians to move beyond the naturalized canon produced by texts, oral accounts, and artifacts. In this sense, photographs are not mere pictorial representations of reality; they participate in a broader dialogue involving nuclear history, ethics, and the relational accountability of photographers, as well as the institutions—museums, archives, and research centers—that preserve and interpret them. These institutions, along with researchers themselves, become part of the photographs’ biography. In short, I argue, constructing a global history of the nuclear age requires expanding the visual geography of nuclear history beyond its dominant Euro-American frame. For example, although the International Atomic Energy Agency has recently published a finding aid https://archives-catalogue.iaea.org/Search6/search/simple to its vast archives, including a large selection of images, these photographs still primarily reflect a Global North perspective on nuclear activities in the so-called developing world, rather than documenting how these processes were experienced, represented, and negotiated locally. What we need instead is new narratives shaped by diverse local experiences, aesthetics, and power relations.

While preparing my recent exhibition on the history of radiation protection, entitled Living with Radiation, I became aware of an astonishingly rich paper and digital trail of photographs documenting the development of nuclear science and industry. (For a visual history of radiation protection, see https://cleio-press.de/). Yet, these images overwhelmingly represent the history of the nuclear age from the perspective of the Global North, perpetuating a particular historiographical lens on regions long described as the “developing world.” For decades, historians have used images as sources of historical knowledge—often as supplements or correctives to textual records. Photographs have been mobilized to substantiate historical claims, to enrich biographical and autobiographical accounts, and to complement oral histories. For “text-heavy” historians, images have traditionally held value only insofar as they reinforced established narratives. However, the recent visual turn in historical scholarship has elevated images to a different epistemological and historiographical status. Images can function as a distinct language, one that allows historians to move beyond the naturalized canon produced by texts, oral accounts, and artifacts. In this sense, photographs are not mere pictorial representations of reality; they participate in a broader dialogue involving nuclear history, ethics, and the relational accountability of photographers, as well as the institutions—museums, archives, and research centers—that preserve and interpret them. These institutions, along with researchers themselves, become part of the photographs’ biography. In short, I argue, constructing a global history of the nuclear age requires expanding the visual geography of nuclear history beyond its dominant Euro-American frame. For example, although the International Atomic Energy Agency has recently published a finding aid https://archives-catalogue.iaea.org/Search6/search/simple to its vast archives, including a large selection of images, these photographs still primarily reflect a Global North perspective on nuclear activities in the so-called developing world, rather than documenting how these processes were experienced, represented, and negotiated locally. What we need instead is new narratives shaped by diverse local experiences, aesthetics, and power relations.

Uncommon connections: my encounters with invisible lives in colonial Taiwan

By Wen-Hua Kuo, Professor at the National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, and President of the 4S – Society for Social Studies of Science

Not trained as a scholar of colonial or postcolonial studies, I nonetheless wrote my longest piece to date—nearly eighty pages—about a group of people labeled as “lepers” under Japanese colonial rule. While it is no longer appropriate to call them that, as they are now recognized as survivors or victims of Hansen’s disease—an infectious disease caused by a pathogen under the same category as that of tuberculosis—the question of how to represent their lives in history remains difficult. This challenge concerns not only historians but also scholars in science, technology, and society studies (STS) who seek to understand their complex circumstances and to give them a voice. When I first engaged in this work, I collaborated with social activists and legal scholars to uncover a “dark” history of human experimentation at Rakuseiin, Taiwan’s only official leprosarium during the colonial period. As I delved into the discourses of those who sought to draw government attention to these patients—colonial and missionary physicians, social welfare officers, local leaders, and ultimately the Governor-General and hygiene bureaucrats—the lives of these patients became increasingly blurred, and in some sense distorted, for the sake of making them “visible.” We now know what these discourses produced: the establishment of a 100-bed leprosarium in 1930. Yet it became a site that justified the colonial government’s policy of confining leprosy patients, reducing their lives to mere numbers for surveillance and management—leaving their human stories still obscured. For me, this has been a surprising and demanding journey, one that has forced me to recover some of my forgotten skills as a historian of public health. I also feel deeply grateful for the opportunity to spend time with these survivors, whose testimonies remind me that good history must begin as good ethnography. For those who are interested in knowing more about this piece (sorry, in Chinese), here is an English abstract of it: