After Trinity is a photographic project I began in the spring of 1987 and resumed in 2009. As an artist I feel a need to do more than just create aesthetically-pleasing photographs. My hope is to make art that both educates and promotes discussion. Global issues have been part of my consciousness for many years. Nuclear weapons (and their proliferation) entered my awareness after I read about Hiroshima as a ninth-grader. Without a doubt the threat of nuclear conflagration and the on-going technological development of such weapons systems are still causing political turmoil worldwide.
With these ideas in mind I adopted a multi-faceted, anthropological approach for this project. I visually catalog the symbols and artifacts of the atomic era, the detritus of early nuclear testing, and the active (or decommissioned) weapons installations just beyond public view.
For the Proximity subset of the After Trinity series my intent was to photograph the dichotomy of typical rural landscapes that sat only a few miles away from active ICBM missile silos. As Mark Rawlinson puts it in his essay titled Out of Sight, Out of Mind, the Proximity triptychs “gather together the tick-tock of everyday life—the work of the grain elevator, the life of the corner convenience store—with the Minuteman ICBM silos. Abutted in this way, the disjunction between one and the other, long forgotten, becomes chillingly apparent: Out of sight is out of mind.”
— Jeff Brouws