Sedan Crater, Area 10, Northern End of Yucca Flat Looking South, Nevada Test Site

Label

Detonated on July 6, 1962, Sedan was a 104-kiloton shallow underground thermonuclear test conducted as part of Project Plowshare at the National Test Site in Nevada. The program explored potential non-military applications of nuclear explosives for large-scale construction and other projects. The resulting explosion emitted radioactive fallout reaching as far as Illinois and the largest man-made crater in the US—approximately 1,280 feet in diameter and 320 feet deep. The aerial perspective in this dramatic photograph by Emmet Gowin displays the geological scale of human impacts on the land made in the name of science and war.

From the 2022 exhibition This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World, curated by Jami C. Powell, Curator of Indigenous Art; Barbara J. MacAdam, former Jonathan L. Cohen Curator of American Art; Thomas H. Price, former Curatorial Assistant; Morgan E. Freeman, former DAMLI Native American Art Fellow; and Michael Hartman, Jonathan Little Cohen Associate Curator of American Art

Course History

ENVS 7, Ecopsychology, Terry Osborne, Spring 2012

ENVS 7, Ecopsychology, Terry Osborne, Winter 2013

SART 30, SART 75, Photography II, III, Virginia Beahan, Spring 2013

ENVS 80, Writing Our Way Home, Terry Tempest Williams, Spring 2012

GEOG 11, Qualitative Methods and the Research Process in Geography, Jennifer Fluri, Winter 2012

GEOG 11, Qualitative Methods and the Research Process in Geography, Jennifer Fluri, Fall 2013

ENVS 7, Ecopsychology, Terry Osborne, Winter 2014

WRIT 7, Religion and Literature: Revisioning the Invisible, Nancy Crumbine, Spring 2014

WRIT 5, Writing into the Wilderness, Nancy Crumbine, Spring 2014

SART 29, Photography I, Christina Seely, Fall 2014

WRIT 5, Writing into the Wilderness, Nancy Crumbine, Fall 2014

WRIT 5, Writing into the Wilderness, Nancy Crumbine, Fall 2014

WRIT 5, Writing Into the Wilderness, Nancy Crumbine, Winter 2015

WRIT 5, Writing Into the Wilderness, Nancy Crumbine, Winter 2015

SART 17.9, The Photographer as Activist: Making Art Inspired by the Hood Museum's Collection , Virginia Beahan, Winter 2015

ENVS 7.3, Ecopsychology, Terry Osborne, Winter 2015

GEOG 11, Qualitative Methods and the Research Process in Geography, Abigail Neely, Winter 2015

WRIT 5, After Humans, Christian Haines, Winter 2015

ENVS 7, Ecopyschology, Terry Osborne, Winter 2019

Exhibition History

Looking Back at Earth: Contemporary Environmental Photography from the Hood Museum of Art Collection, Friends Gallery and the Owen Robertson Cheatham Gallery, Hood Mueum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, July 7-August 26, 2012.

Seeking Solitude: A Selection of Landscape Photographs from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, a Student Curated Exhibition for Professor Katie Hornstein’s History of Photography, ARTH17, Spring 2013, Ivan Albright Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, June 26-September 8, 2013 .

Provenance

Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, New York; sold to present collection, 2011.

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Subjects