“Photography & Radiation” is a personal journey by visual artist Jesse Andrewartha, traveling through 120 years of discovery and darkness. The discovery of radioactivity in the waning years of the nineteenth century may never have occurred were it not for photography. The creation of the autoradiogram, images formed when a radioactive object photographs itself, was our first window into the hidden world of the subatomic realm. Weaving stories of the role of the autoradiogram from the discovery of radioactivity to the present, the film illuminates the essential bond between humankind’s experience of radiation and the role of photography, its power to act as a mirror to our technological power and our folly. It also reveals the power of the autoradiogram to educate as an artform in the 21st century as Jesse creates a new body of work, a series of uranium autoradiograms for the upcoming exhibition “Transmutations: Visualizing Matter | Materializing Vision”.
