The Atomic Photographers Guild is the pre-eminent collective dedicated to visualising all aspects of the nuclear age. Formed in 1987 by Robert Del Tredici, the Guild has since amassed an archive of photographic negatives and prints from more than forty photographers across seven decades. The collection begins with the world’s two first atomic photographers: Berlyn Brixner, the United States’ government’s head photographer of the Manhattan Project, and Yoshito Matsushige, the only photographer to document the atomic destruction of Hiroshima from inside that city on August 6, 1945. Despite the significance of the Guild’s archive, the collection has yet to be formally catalogued and digitised.︎

Principal investigator: N.A.J. Taylor︎
Institutional partner: Atomic Photographers Guild︎
Sponsor: Australian Academy of the Humanities︎
Funding: $2,000 (external)
Key output: cataloguing and digitisation of the Guild’s Yoshito Matsushige, Beryl Brixner, and Robert Del Tredici archive︎