The Cold War reached me, like most things in my childhood, through a television set — on Sunday evenings above all, when the news magazine Weltspiegel brought the war in Vietnam into the living room. Of everything from those broadcasts, nothing stayed with me as vividly as footage of nuclear tests.
I photograph that footage today, found again on YouTube, at ISO 51,000 or higher, so that grain and broken color carry a memory that is still vivid and slowly fading at the same time.
I could have gone back to the horrors of Vietnam. It seemed too easy. What interests me more is that the worst thing human beings have ever built produces images of great beauty. I believe there is nothing worse than a nuclear explosion, and still these pictures hold the eye. That is what I want to show: how many things have two sides.
