Sim Chi Yin Nevada, USA. November 2017.
In 2017, while working on an exhibition commission on nuclear weapons for the Nobel Peace Prize, I applied for permission to visit the vast Nevada Air Force Base Comp
(...) lex–which is known for its lunar landscape, a result of all the nuclear weapons tests carried out there–but we were turned down. I was forced to be ‘outside looking in,’ driving along its perimeter and trying to metaphorically see what was hidden beyond those mountains. For the exhibition commission, I created a series of diptychs comparing American Cold War-era nuclear landscapes with present-day North Korean ones. Indeed, I was also kept out of the North Korean plants, and had to photograph from the Chinese side of their shared border, at the closest points to Pyongyang’s known nuclear and military sites.
In a similar way to other landscape imagery in my practice, the photograph–often taken to be, by nature, evidential–is almost counter-evidential in this case. Nothing is laid out in plain sight. These landscapes can be read with some imagination, to ‘see’ what lies beneath, beyond.
Sim Chi Yin © Sim Chi Yin | Magnum Photos