Obrian

This year the Thakore Family Foundation, The India Club of Vancouver, Institute for the Humanities and the J.S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University celebrates the 21st annual Gandhi Jayanti Celebration with an Award to John O’Brian, for his recent work on how the history of the imagery related to the Atomic Bomb has acclimated us to the bomb.

He will be speaking on the topic: Through a Radioactive Lens: The Nuclear Era, Photography, and Canada.

The Award this year honours Professor O’Brian’s academic work that has a deep relationship to Canadian culture’s history, in particular how art and images relate to thinking how the engagement of photography with the atomic era in Canada has influenced our ambivalence toward the presence of the atomic bomb worldwide. His research forms part of a larger project on nuclear photography in North America and Japan, called “Camera Atomica.” “Camera Atomica” is also the name of an exhibition he is preparing for the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Professor O’Brian’s illustrated talk will show the flash points and intersections between nuclear events and Canada’s ambivalence about its role in those events, the existence of non-violent protest, and the uses of photography as a cultural image bank for our nuclear times. He will trace Canada’s changing opinions of the health hazards of atomic testing and the arms race and how anti-nuclear peace movements, the uses of atomic research and atomic energy then and now, have shaped Canada’s self-image. In histories of nuclear protest, it is sometimes forgotten that the first Aldermaston anti-atomic March in England occurred in 1952 and was called Operation Gandhi, and involved 35 people.

John O'Brian

While finishing his Ph.D. at Harvard, John O’Brian joined the University of British Columbia in 1987. At UBC he is Professor of Art History and Faculty Associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. He has published extensively on modern art history, theory and criticism, and in particular on the institutionalization of modernism in North America. Professor O’Brian has produced more than a dozen books and sixty articles on subjects related to modernism and Art History.