Dunedin Public Art Gallery
At 2:45am on August 6, 1945 a B-29 under the command of Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, a twenty-nine year old veteran pilot, began to roll down a runway on Tinian Island to take off on its historic mission to Hiroshima.
The title of New Zealand artist Fiona Amundsen’s current exhibition, First city in history, refers to the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the first city in the world to be subjected to nuclear warfare when it was bombed by the United States in World War II. The images highlight both the contemporary state of Hiroshima after considerable reconstruction and the city as it is now. As well as preserving a sense of the impact caused by the deafening sound of Uranium 235, the atomic bomb released 1900 feet above devastating the city in 1945, the exhibition includes an image of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, with ghostly figures highlighted through a shaft of bold, golden light, unsettling the viewer at first gaze.
The project underpins the deeply subjective experience of public sites with historical and cultural elements, and the way in which they are represented through photography. Amundsen’s images are framed by a meticulously formalised compositional structure, which seeks to dismantle traditional implications linked with photography, such as social convention and narrative connotations. Each image both sharply reminds the viewer of the subject’s history, yet highlights the way in which the stillness of photography enables the artist to capture a point of difference not usually described in such a way. It is in this way that Amundsen’s First city in history transports the viewer and allows for the unique intimacy of scouring the picture plane, utterly transfixed.
Fiona Amundsen: First city in history.
