Tuesday, September 23, 2008



The National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque is getting ready to move to a new location away from its current facility in the Old Town District. The expanded facility will allow the display of several WWII-era aircraft as well as other new features. The exhibits in place now are pretty well mounted and tell their story well, with the exception of the parts dealing with the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The story is ok as far as it goes, focusing on the point of view of most Americans at the time about the rationale of the bombing and its outcome. Where it comes up short is in depicting anything near to what the reality was on the ground in Japan. There are a few statistics on deaths, a photo of an incinerated tricycle, and another of a bunch of smiling Japanese children in a memorial park. It is an inadequate portrayal of what happened.

I took the picture of the sign on the museum roof with a '1950s Soviet camera, a FED 1g that is a copy of the 1930s German Leica. I still need to do a little work on the shutter, but the camera and the Elmar-copy collapsible lens show great promise. As usual, the cats were happy to serve as test shot models and to help me finish off the roll.


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