Elin O’Hara Slavick will discuss her new book After Hiroshima, which Kyo Maclear called “One of the most beautiful and politically truthful books I have encountered in recent years,” and Akira Mizuta Lippit described the book as “a work of dark poetics that calls forth the necessity of remaining vigilant to the sights that test and contest the ubiquitous afterlife of radioactivity.”

The photographic images of Hiroshima in After Hiroshima are attempts to visually, poetically, and historically address the magnitude of what disappeared as a result of and what remains after the dropping of the A-bomb in 1945. They are images of loss and survival, fragments and lives, architecture and skin, surfaces and invisible things, like radiation.

Exposure is at the core of the author’s photographic project: exposure to radiation, to the sun, to light, to history, and exposures made from radiation, the sun, light, and historical artifacts from the Peace Memorial Museum’s collection.

Hiroshima: After Hiroshima engages ethical seeing, visually registers warfare, and addresses the irreconcilable paradox of making visible the most barbaric as witness, artist, and viewer.

Slavick is a distinguished professor of Visual Art, Theory, and Practice at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has exhibited her work in Hong Kong, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Scotland, England, Cuba, Japan, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia, and across the United States. She is the author of Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography (Charta, 2007), with a foreword by Howard Zinn and an essay by Carol Mavor; and After Hiroshima (Daylight Books, 2013), with an essay by James Elkins.

Slavick is also a curator, critic, and activist. Her exhibition Hiroshima: After Aftermath was exhibited at the former Bank of Japan (which had been bombed) in Hiroshima in 2011. She grew up in Maine in an activist family, marching against war, organizing against nuclear power, and standing in Portland's main square every August 6 to remember Hiroshima.

She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA in photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.