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The following day he piloted it over Japan and dropped the world’s first atomic bomb. Colonel Paul Tibbets christened the airplane after his mother, Enola Gay. The plane was brought to Wendover on July 14th, where it was stationed for two weeks before being flown to Tinian Island in the Pacific Ocean. It was one of only fifteen of the bombers modified for atomic bomb missions and given a unique silver-plate finish.
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In spring of 1945 the Boeing “Superfortress” bomber serial number B-2945-MO-44-86292 rolled off the assembly line in Omaha, Nebraska. Each aircraft had 55,000 separately numbered parts and a million rivets holding together acres of aluminum skin. The hangar we’re in was used to maintain B-29 bombers, then the largest, most complicated and expensive weapon delivery system ever built.
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Today more of this base is left standing than at any other American facility abandoned from that period. The remains of the Wendover Army Air Field stand just east of the Nevada-Utah border and west of the largest salt flat in North America. And always the photographer is as much participant as observer. It doesn’t stop decay, but selects an image in which our perception of the process is arrested. Photography is not a momentary stay against entropy. He’s doing what he always does, complicating our sense of time and place by bringing forth a trace from the past, not a memory exactly, but more like a shadow from and of history. He’s using sunlight that’s several minutes old to photograph the present on a surface poured sixty years ago.
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Klett arranges the legs of the tripod around the disk, goes back under the black cloth, and leaves one hand free to cast a shadow. The first fixed photographic image was, in fact, a heliograph created during an eight-hour exposure made out a window by the Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826, a dim message we can still decipher today. But the word also means a photograph made by placing an object onto a sensitized paper and letting unmitigated sunlight create the exposure, transferring an image onto the surface. I’m reminded of the heliographs - sun signals - used to communicate from nearby mountaintop to mountaintop in the 19th century by bouncing light off mirrors. As the day progresses and the sun declines, they will elongate and, no longer truly pictures of the sun, simply become puddles of light. I watch the sun pictures track slowly across the floor. Klett splays his fingers, looks at the shadow on the floor, then goes to retrieve the tripod and camera. Sunlight from a nuclear furnace 93 million miles away is focused into pictures of the sun, a crude but perfect camera obscura. Disks of light are scattered on the floor and the photographer puts his hand into one of the beams cast by a hole in the ceiling 52 feet above us. The structure is 200 by 228 feet, by far the largest hangar on what during World War II was the largest bombing range in the world. When Klett’s finished making his panorama of the doors, we circle the floor looking for evidence left at the scene, a forensic search performed as much on history as on a place. It’s as if we’re being x-rayed, assaulted by the glare of the adjacent salt flats. It leaks in all around us, between the doors and through bullet holes in the galvanized siding. Even though the doors are pulled shut, and most of the hangar is in shadows, we can’t escape the light. The rolling doors of the hangar are so large that it takes Klett four photographs to capture them from end-to-end, eight segments on rails meant to accommodate a bomber with wings almost as wide as a football field and a tail standing three stories high. The corrugated metal sheets hanging from the curved steel trusses boom and rattle in the scorching wind. Sheets of asbestos hang from the ceiling and rodent droppings are everywhere underfoot. Behind us stands a boxing ring where a local promoter has been staging fights between women boxers from Mexico. Pigeons trace parabolas 50 feet above us, while in a high corner of the metal cavern two ravens rag at us from their nest. His hands remain outside, tilting and adjusting the lens as he brings the far wall of the immense airplane hangar into focus. Mark Klett tucks his head under the dark cloth of the camera.