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Welcome to Richland, Washington, also known as Bomber Territory.
The US town of Richland, in Washington State, was built in the early 1940s to house workers at the nearby nuclear site, where they manufactured the plutonium used in the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. Today, many residents of Richland are proud of its heritage as a nuclear company town, and proud of the part they played in creating the bomb – after all, wouldn’t we all be speaking Japanese, otherwise?
Irene Lusztig’s beautifully poised observation of Richland makes no hasty judgments on the residents of a town that stakes its identity on this little-known atomic origin story. She offers a prismatic portrait of a community, encountering nuclear workers and archeologists; observing the town parade and the identikit houses; questioning narratives and grappling with the concept of legacy as Richland’s High School football team take to the field displaying their distinctive mushroom cloud emblem.
With the prospect of nuclear warfare back in the headlines, this understated portrait blooms into an expansive and lyrical meditation home, safety and identity, which examines the habits of thought that normalise the extraordinary violence of the past.
