Narrative Half-Life

This series traces my familial and military ties to the origins of the atomic bomb and to Hanford, Washington, site of the first full-scale atomic reactor. This site was constructed in secret as part of the Manhattan Project during WWII in order to produce plutonium for the world's first atomic weapons. The locality has a distinct and lasting environmental legacy, besides Chernobyl, Hanford is one of the most contaminated places on earth. The 500-square-mile swath of land is home to ninety percent of the radioactive material used to produce the US arsenal during the arms race of the Cold War.

Narrative Half-Life is a continuing series of creative nonfiction media works that co- mingle family myths as told to me by my Grandfather, Colonel William Sapper, a Manhattan Project engineer and my mother, Lynn Needham who grew up in Richland during the war. During the during the early 1940s, intense secrecy shrouded the city of Richland Washington and Bill, who was also an amateur photographer and sound recordist, documented both friends, co-workers and family. These present -myths are assembled from boxes of images, stories and correspondence that are a part of my studio and are informed by titles in the Memory Works series.

The Plutonia Album

For this series the light table in my studio is θέατρον, ”a place for viewing." This is the word that Roman historian and senator Cassius Dio used to describe the Plutonion at Hierapolis, a cave-temple renowned for its toxic gas, or Pluto’s breath. I look in, crafting collage views of an atomic past that are my images of an underworld, my familia Plutonia.  

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.

Walter Benjamin.

These in camera images were created using my archive and with the research assistance of MFA student, Jordan Bargett.  

Live performance during Radiophonic, Les Brigittines,Brussels, (Radio Panik 105.4 FM). Additional solar sounds generously contributed by heiloseismologist Alexander Kosovichev.

I was curious to view the sun above this place, a swath of high desert that had such an intense focus as a point of origin for parts of the “work” that was the Manhattan Project. During one visit, I was told to throw away my shoes, don’t take them home I was advised. I followed crows, viewing them through the sunroof, ending up on a less travelled spur road near the Columbia. Near the end of this video, my mother Lynn shares her story about observing a meteor shower in Richland as a young girl.

A field recording of 20 miles of barded wire on the banks of the Columbia River.