Two of my favorite photography collections are The Red Couch: A Portrait of America, and The Love Book. The former features a large red couch that is carted around the country and photographed in settings ranging from the window-washer's platform high up on the side of a skyscraper, to an off-shore oil rig in the Gulf Coast. The Love Book centers on a red and yellow plywood sign reading "LOVE". Bob Rosenheck traveled around the country, taking pictures of people holding this little sign capturing, among many others, Mikhail Gorbachev, Orpah Winfry, Bob Hope, Spinal Tap, and Bill Clinton.
The Atomic Bomb project is the same sort of thing. When we first got married, we thought it would be neat to get a guest registry and have everyone who visited us sign in, kind of like at a wedding. We were wrong, it wasn't very neat. So we chewed on the idea for a while and decided that in order to make it neat, we'd need to take pictures of everyone who visited us and tack 'em up on the wall like they do in Saturn dealerships. To make sure this effort would be neat, the photos would feature our guests doing something they couldn't do anywhere else: Pressing the button on an armed Atomic Bomb. (As American Citizens, we have the constitutional right to bear arms, and we at Wunderland have taken this right to its logical conclusion: a nuclear weapon.)
There's a limited amount of space available for the bomb photo wall at Wunderland.Earth. Each time it fills up, we take all the photos down and start over. This book mirrors the photos that are on the wall right now. The current wall, #3, is about one third full at this time. (For wall #4, we plan to begin photographing our friends with our atomic bomb in the midst of their own living rooms, rather like another of my favorite photography collections, Material World: A Global Family Portrait.)
