Nuclear Baroque
ISBN-13: 9783969002339
Contributor(s): Fannie Frederikke Baden
Subject: Individual Photographers
Publisher Imprint: Kehrer Verlag
Publication Date: 26-11-2026
Format: Hardback
Availability: Out of stock
£44.00
About the book
Radioactivity is invisible, yet popular culture insists on making it shine. From glowing objects and luminous bodies to contaminated landscapes and spectacular scenes of disaster, images of radioactive pollution have shaped how nuclear power is imagined, feared, desired and remembered. Drawing on her doctoral research, Fannie Frederikke Baden presents Nuclear Baroque a scholarly monograph investigating the history of nuclear visual culture and how these images influence our understanding of radioactivity, disaster and a nuclear future. Today, many scholars argue that we are situated within a ÅNuclear RenaissanceÄ: a moment of renewed optimism about nuclear power as a possible solution to the climate crisis and energy insecurity. Baden, however, argues that popular visual culture tells a markedly different story. Rather than celebrating technological progress and energy utopia, it repeatedly returns to images of life next to disaster: pollution, mutation, ruin and tragedy. The nuclear glow, in this context, turns from a sign of technological and political promise into an exaggerated reminder of nuclear destruction. Baden describes this visual language as ÅNuclear BaroqueÄ: a world of fantasy, spectacle, and excess in which the consequences of nuclear disaster become absurdly ÅsensibleÄ. Such representations can make catastrophe appear both distant and unreal, and potentially obscure the environmental and technoscientific realities of nuclear power. How does this nuclear visual culture actively build and re-build our contemporary understanding of nuclear energy? And what aesthetic experience occurs when we encounter beautifully made devastation? While nuclear science and policy shape the future of nuclear energy at an institutional level, Baden examines how popular visual culture influences its perception within wider society; how images of spectacle, catastrophe and beauty influence the ways in which nuclear power is imagined and understood beyond the realms of scientific and political discourse.