Even eagle-eyed travelers would be unlikely to spot the nuclear arsenal buried in the verdant meadows and graveled hills of the Great Plains.
The protruding towers, thin poles and low concrete platforms that dot the sites could just as well mark natural gas wells or oil terminals. Only government officials, neighboring farmers and Minneapolis photographer Paul Shambroom are likely to realize that the odd extrusions mark silos housing the nation's 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), whose nuclear warheads are trained on sites around the world. Many of the silos are unmanned, their 1.6-acre plots surrounded by chain-link fences and barbed wire. The curious can approach as near as 15 feet, but an armed response team is deployed if an intruder jumps the fence. Promise.
For three decades Shambroom, 55, has focused on issues of "Power and Place," as his current show is titled at the University of Minnesota's Katherine E. Nash Gallery. On view through Feb. 4, it samples three photo series by Shambroom, who recently joined the U's Art Department as an assistant professor. His nine "Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles" pictures depict innocuous landscapes that conceal deadly weapons.
Four "U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve" photos document bucolic Gulf Coast landscapes under which the country is storing 727 million barrels of crude oil, enough to keep the American way of life humming for 59 days in a worst-case emergency. A dozen pictures titled "Shrines" record outmoded weapons that have been redeployed nationwide as playground equipment, memorials, tourist attractions and even religious signposts.
Despite their militaristic subjects and potentially patriotic themes, these are strangely undemonstrative images, most notable for their understated normalcy and beautiful light, be it a luminous cloud floating over a mirror-still canal above a petroleum cache in Bryan Mound, Texas, or a rainbow arching over a missile field somewhere in the Midwest. There's no suggestion of political tension or latent danger, no hint that the water might ever ooze oil or that the prairie could suddenly erupt with a lethal barrage sufficient to incinerate much of the planet.
In fact, Shambroom admits that the placid beauty of the oil storage sites momentarily stumped him. With no signs of what they cover, how could he suggest their national significance? Then he recalled 17th-century Dutch landscapes whose shimmering skies also symbolized peaceful prosperity, and proceeded to make his photos echo the luminosity of their Dutch antecedents.
With his cool eye and deadpan demeanor, Shambroom never sensationalizes, exploits, hypes, criticizes, editorializes or takes a political position on his potentially controversial subjects. He has spent his career trying to picture aspects of American life that are elusive and sometimes virtually invisible, places and things that embody our fears and define our hopes.
Only in the "Shrine" photos is there, perhaps, a more overt hint of irony, as when he presents the white shaft of a nuclear missile rising near a picture-perfect church steeple in Warren, N.H., or a Vietnam-era Huey helicopter, mounted on an American Legion pedestal, that appears to be descending upon a line of neatly landscaped suburban houses in Alpharetta, Ga.
