Forgotten Cameras and Unknown Audiences: Photography, The Time Machine and the Atom Bomb

Abstract

Timberlake’s research focuses upon the tension between realism and imagination that is produced when viewing photographic evidence of scientifically informed events. The chapter takes as its starting point two narratives of science fiction and fact involving the camera in a pivotal role. The forgotten Kodak camera which HG Wells’s time traveller refers to in and which, via negativa, plays a key role in the way the story is told and received by its fictional audience. This is examined in relationship to the photographic record of nuclear weapons development and testing, reflected in books such as George Dyson’s Orion, the Atomic Powered Spaceship (2002) and Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986).