We packed a lot into our very short time in Vancouver, but my favorite stop was the opportunity to visit and hang out with atomic photographer, filmmaker, and sole @uraniumfilm festival coordinator in Canada for the 2024 tour, Jesse Andrewartha, in his East Van home. Here we are in his darkroom. And here he is displaying the radioactive properties of his prized slice of polished uranium ore. Let me tell you: that crackling of the Geiger counter is an eerie basement sound!
Jesse Andrewartha is a Canadian filmmaker, photographer, and visual effects artist specializing in historical & obscure darkroom techniques using analogue ultra large format & motion picture film. We got to see some of his uranotypes (hand coated images made with photosensitive uranium salts) and palladiotypes (variant of the platinum print) hanging on his living room walls as his kids ate strawberries and pain au chocolat, and it was all so wonderfully domestic and surreal.
Here he is showing off the slice of uranium he kept after getting rid of the batch he’d scored from an estate sale – the background radiation in his home was a touch too elevated! I absolutely love artists who obsess about their subjects in this way (I sometimes have to battle against that tendency within myself).
Jesse shared that his journey began in science class in school and developed through his study of scientific photography in college. This led him to the @atomicphotographersguild who will be exhibiting as part of @uraniumfilm fest in Vancouver in April. And we’ll be screening his @transmutationsproject documentary at @nwfilmforum in Seattle as well! You should come!
One thing I noticed about Vancouver that I hadn’t realized before coming here is the high concentration of mining and mineral extraction companies based in the downtown business core. These include several uranium mining companies, including the one based in Suite 3150 of the tower where I found Larissa Maxwell’s artwork. I’d toyed with the idea of taking the elevator to have a look, but this lobby and the exhibition title – “”worlds apart, worlds together,”” a reference to the pandemic – seemed plenty poignant.
But I do want to do that at some point; it’s another take on how “”atomic”” photography makes “”visible the invisible”” – except, instead of radiation hotspots or secret bases, it’s the mundane corporate spaces that make Canada’s role in the nuclear story so imperceptible.
Vancouver is a “”nuclear-free zone,”” as a few signs around town still attest (though I couldn’t find any). The closest nuclear plant is in Washington. And yet, this city was built on extractivism, ever since that first gold was found in Fraser River. And now, as per the Vancouver Economic Commission, “”some 1,200 mineral exploration companies are located in resource-abundant British Columbia, with approximately 800 headquartered in Vancouver.”” That’s a story I want to learn more about.
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What makes radiation so fascinating? And why are photographers the most fascinated? I think it has something to do with the way the two topics intersect around the politics and erotics of (in)visibility.
“For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.” There’s something deep within us that wants to peer behind the veil – scientifically, aesthetically, organizationally.
Radiation is a most devastatingly felt sense that there really is something beyond our “”natural”” realities. And photography constantly yearns to reach into that realm.