The Dugout by Emily Childs5/23/2023 Specifically, this paper investigates the shifting relations between physical site and visual representation, or sight. In closely examining Life magazine drawings and photographs of the first explosion near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1945, as well as later tests on the Nevada Proving Ground, plus two popular atomic films – Split Second (1953) and Them! (1954), this master's thesis traces a historical shift in the cultural production, or signification, of “the desert.” Landscape is taken as a mediated category, a historical, metaphorical, visual, spatial, material, and ideological construct or practice. While previously pictured as a pristine wilderness or rugged national frontier, in the 1940s and 1950s, mass media images of atomic tests coded the American desert West as a technological and apocalyptic space. Along the way, it has accumulated a thick and complex layering of associations. Although often associated with blankness and vacancy, the desert West has been among the most heavily represented of postwar American landscapes.
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