In Dairy for the Downwinders, I explore my ancestors' experience living downwind of the Nevada Test Site. Between 1951 and 1992, over one thousand nuclear tests were detonated in the desert in Nevada. My ancestors lived and worked on a dairy farm and consumed milk from the cows that grazed on the land contaminated by nuclear fallout. Two of my great-uncles died of myeloid leukemia, a cancer with known ties to nuclear testing. The impacts of nuclear harm echo for generations, provoking detriments to our health, socioeconomic displacement, environmental contamination, and cultural and psychological trauma. This series explores where the land meets the body and the challenge of truth-telling in a community of secret-keepers.
In the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of children across the country were exposed to radionuclides through milk because of nuclear testing. The portraits refer to campaigns from the 1980s that featured images of missing people on milk cartons. Although the campaign was largely unsuccessful, it left a mark on our collective memory.
Using family photographs, I create portraits on glass milk jars with liquid light by applying silver-gelatin emulsion directly to the surface and developing each piece by hand in the darkroom. This materially fragile process allows the image to emerge through physical contact with archival images, chemistry, and time. I work with 19th-century photographic processes to reflect on how histories persist, recur, and resurface, embedding the past materially within the present.
Dairy for the Downwinders examines the intergenerational health, memory, and cultural consequences of nuclear fallout. It situates private grief within a broader national legacy that remains unresolved, as renewed attention to the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act underscores the continuing scale and urgency of nuclear harm.
