Santa Fean Magazine: Stealing Fire
A portrait gallery by David Robin
Introduction by Mary Anne Redding
Since moving to Santa Fe from New York four years ago, award-winning commercial and fine-art photographer David Robin has developed an interest in Los Alamos National Laboratories and the men and women who have worked there. On these pages he presents black-and-white portraits of five Santa Fe based scientist who spent important parts of their career “on the hill”. The quotes that accompany each image were collected by Robin and Redding, chair of the photography department at Santa Fe University of Art and Design, who interviewed the scientists about their time living and working at Los Alamos and how the experience shaped their lives.
In 1943, an isolated site on the Pajarito Plateau was selected for the Manhattan Project, in which components of the atomic bomb were to be developed and tested in extreme secrecy. For the Pueblo people who lived in the remote landscape some 30 miles from Santa Fe, the mesas, mountains and canyons they had inhabited for thousands of years were sacred. This land was respected as a fire site, a place of change where the energies of life that emerged from mother earth were visible in the volcanic undulations of the landscape. Newly arrived in an environment they did not fully understand, the scientists and U.S. Army personnel brought their own desires for unleashing unseen energies of the cosmos, superimposing their own rituals for controlling the secrets of nature on the landscape. Everyone was intent on stealing fire from the skies.
Mary Anne Redding