Sarah Vowell: I envy you. You’ve been to Greenbriar! My favorite vacation is to go someplace where something really horrible happened, like the Salem witch trials or Wounded Knee, but to stay in a really nice hotel. So Greenbriar is of course my holy grail—a swank resort with its very own bomb shelter museum. What can you tell me about that discrepancy between horseback riding and spa treatments, and a formerly secret Congressional fallout complex?
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Richard Ross: Greenbriar is a WASP heaven in rural West Virginia. For thirty years the existence of a bomb shelter for the US Congress underneath the elite resort was kept secret. The structure, which has thirty-ton blast doors and could hold 1,800 people, was built during the Eisenhower administration. Interestingly, it was stocked with alcohol but no condoms.
The Laura Ashley-on-acid décor above is in stark contrast to the austerity below. In this surreal world, Congress would function in what looks like a high school auditorium with a photomural of the Capitol in the briefing room. This, theoretically, would allow a speaker of the House or Senate leader to appear on TV in front of the “Capitol” and offer assurance to the nation as if everything was normal.
The shelter was “outed” in 1992 and since then has become primarily a tourist attraction.
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SV: Those places where evil and beauty coexist so blatantly feel very American to me. Like your photograph of those air vents in Montana. At first, the picture seems like just another purple mountains majesty postcard vista, until one realizes what those air vents are for, what those air vents are about.
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RR: I feel guilty about the existing beauty in some of the images. After years of photographing and working with light, I can take a pile of rubbish, light it intensely, and make it look like magic. These places are chilling physically with a preponderant, eerie stillness. I think they have a distinctly diabolical beauty.
The Emigrant Mountains in my picture stand in stark contrast to what lies beneath. The air vents were shot specifically with the breathtaking landscape in the background to emphasize this. A casual passer-by would never see these vents and could not suspect what they signal below. In effect, we are all casual viewers of the landscape. For reasons unknown I have taken on the odd responsibility of making what is hidden, visible—by changing the status of these structures from covert to overt.
SV: Who are Phillip Hoag and Charlie Hull?
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RR: Phillip Hoag authored the book No Such Thing as Doomsday and hosts the Web site www. nodoom.com. He is a nice guy who helps broker power plants in underdeveloped portions of the world. He is peripherally involved with the Elizabeth Clare Prophet group and the Church Universal Triumphant. Charlie Hull is a retired teacher from Fresno, California, who is also a member of that church. He built a bomb shelter to house about ninety families, which he estimated cost over a million bucks. Hull was wistful in describing the number of vacations in Hawaii, new boats, or cars that have gone into the shelter.
Hoag let me spend the night in his shelter, a space cavernous enough to house several hundred people. It is a little bit like a Popular Science project gone array. Originally, both his and Hull’s shelter were built as the result of a real threat—the proximity to the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile fields of eastern Montana—mixed with the doomsday prophesy of the Elizabeth Clair Prophet sect.
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SV: Funny you mention that, because I grew up in Montana, and I was simply obsessed with nuclear war. When I was sixteen, I could have drawn you a map of those missile sites, or, as I would have thought of them back then, targets. In some ways, I was relieved to live in a place that was so clearly on the Soviets’ radar, because I was more afraid of living than dying. I was petrified of nuclear winter specifically. Because I’m from the last real cold war generation: post-shelter. The shelters seem very Eisenhower-era to me. They’re relatively happy and hopeful because they assumed a person could survive and would want to. But by the time I was old enough to start planning a future, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have one. I’m still amazed I got to grow up. Amazed!
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RR: Through my reading—which I admit has been compulsive—I realized that nuclear winter might be a myth, the equivalent of a global urban legend. The optimal effectiveness from a nuclear blast occurs at significant altitudes, not ground zero. Ground bursts, which generate more fallout, release more atmospheric contaminants (dust clouds + blocked sun = nuclear winter), but ground bursts are less effective in the magnitude of total destructive power and therefore less likely to be used in a nuclear strike.
There are innumerable things to fear about a nuclear exchange that are symbolized by the existence of shelters designed to protect a citizenry from an overwhelming, devastating attack. If you put the images of people’s fears into a visual representation, the clear winner is the mushroom cloud—the poster child of the cold war. I think the bomb shelter, specifically the blast shelter, has been something that has existed as a literary or intellectual idea but never as a visual image. My goal with this project was to reexamine these locations—to visualize them and evoke their present status. And thereby make them real and tangible.
Working on this project I realized that there is such a minute number of extant shelters that they are ineffective as a logical solution or salvation. The destruction that can be caused by a nuclear (chemical/biological) exchange is so vast that the number of people who could be “saved” by a shelter
system is inconsequential, and, in fact, is illusory. Regardless of the number of shelters, a nuclear exchange means an end to civilization as we know it. It may not end all life, but it would certainly be the most drastic evolutionary hiccup experienced by humankind and way beyond the scope of the horrendous legacy of Hiroshima.
I think the fears you have about nuclear winter mainly involve worrying what the corpses will look like. I don’t want to denigrate your concerns, but I see them as fears concentrating on the details rather than focusing on the death of civilization. Maybe that’s how we, as individuals, deal with death. The big picture, the demise of the world, is relegated to unimportant, being inconceivable, unbelievable. It’s the “little” things like our own mortality that obfuscate the enormity of world endings.
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SV: Oh, you’re just saying that to cheer me up! In high school, my friends and I started an anti-nuclear group. Looking back, it seems so adorable, that we were teenagers in the middle of nowhere who thought handing out pie charts of the federal government’s defense spending budget in grocery store parking lots would do any good. We didn’t have a lot of members, though. I remember once we arranged to show a film about the effects of nuclear winter—I told you I was obsessed—during lunch, and the only person who showed up to see it was a West German foreign-exchange student. Do you ever have that problem? Getting people excited about looking at fallout shelters, I mean? What has been your experience in terms of getting people to come look at pictures of things most people would rather forget?
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RR: Looking at things you would rather not confront? You have just described the human condition. Who wants to look or even think about architecture for the end of the world? I have always believed in Ernest Becker’s argument that the denial of death is predominant in defining the human condition rather than the Freudian sex drive. Do people want to think about sex or death? The answer is pretty evident from human behavior.
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SV: I have a friend who says that when he was in high school and his sex-ed teacher said that boys his age think of sex several times a minute, he remembers sitting there thinking, “No, death. I think about death every twelve seconds.”
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RR: Many of the shelters are almost womblike, structurally organic spaces with an entrance resembling a reversed birth canal: a mysterious, inviting, convoluted tunnel with a light at the end of it, promising security, protection, nutrition, and life-granting safety inside. Think of reemerging from this sanctuary and being reborn into a world that is fearful and drastically changed from what we had known before and from what we imagined could happen. Sex and death all tied together—it is getting too metaphorical for me.
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SV: When I was in college studying art history, I went through this modernist phase. I really bought into all those high modernist ideals about industrialism and the machine age. One thing the modernists taught us was to find the beauty in factories and grain silos and rivets and bolts. I’m reminded of that ethos in your images. They’re beautiful—perfect compositions, almost religious light. Except, unlike, say, Charles Sheeler’s photos, yours have this edge. Instead of being an example of human progress and efficiency, these shelters are examples of how our progress let us progress to the point of mutually assured destruction. Would you talk about that? About finding aesthetic beauty in these bad ideas?
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RR: I am drawn to sites where benign neglect dominates. Many of the shelters I visited are abandoned or not used. The sparse light in these shelters is clean, symmetrical, undisturbed—waiting for my camera.
Does this “safe-keeping” architecture represent progress? It represents massive delusion. Efficiency? For whom? If an infinitesimally small portion of the species survives, is this efficient for the group as a whole? On some level, perhaps it is. I really don’t know how to define the human condition anymore.
Looking at it from a theological standpoint, it is interesting to note that almost every civilization has ascension myths. Going up—arising, ascending into Heaven above—achieves salvation. Hell is the big descent—going down into hell. But this liturgical depiction confuses the issue of below-ground salvation. Any light looking up and out toward the environment in this context represents a blast, destruction, apocalypse. Light, which we usually gravitate toward, here brings massive death and obliteration.
The only civilization that I know of that doesn’t practice any ascension dogma is the Native American people. They believe Mother Earth opens up and embraces an individual when life has been completed. Maybe the predominance of these shelters in western states is an admission that the natives of this country had it right.
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SV: One of the photos is of a civil defense meeting at Salt Lake City’s city hall. When was that and what were they saying?
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RR: There are several images of people meeting in these shelters. In Salt Lake City there is a civil defense meeting once every month, during which people exchange information on ventilation, communication, and nutrition in case of emergency. In Switzerland I observed an orientation meeting of high school students learning the intricacies of the group shelters. Allegedly, in Switzerland 110 percent of the population can be housed underground in two hours. These people in Switzerland and Utah are serious. I think if there were a real nuclear exchange, the survivors would be Bush, Cheney, some Israelis, the Swiss, the Mormons, and assorted insects—a curious mixture.
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SV: The picture in England of a highway marker for Kelvedon Hatch that says “Secret Nuclear Bunker” is hilarious. What is that place?
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RR: Kelvedon Hatch is in Essex, England. It started out as a rotor station, then became a cold war defense bunker, and later served as a decentralized governmental post-apocalyptic station. The massive structure, which is today privately owned, spreads out over three levels. The owners cater private parties and offer tours through the shelter. As any other tourist attraction, Kelvedon Hatch depends on advertising and signage to attract visitors.
SV: I was amused by how much the two dummies in the bunk bed recalled that Ed Kienholz installation of the mental institution, though yours might be creepier if that’s possible.
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RR: What’s creepier than institutionally anticipated destruction and acceptable casualties? Kienholz doesn’t stand a chance.
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SV: The Moscow pictures are fascinating. I caught myself enjoying their crumbliness. Like in my head I still haven’t completely stopped fighting the cold war. I was alarmed at how nostalgic I felt. Not that I miss the USSR, but all my formative years were so part of that old world of the Berlin Wall and the KGB. I’ve had the same address book most of my life, and there are still old addresses in it marked “West Germany.” But all that has vanished to the point that looking at your pictures makes me feel saner. That old familiar world is so far gone that sometimes I catch myself thinking I dreamed it.
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RR: I felt I had to document the shelters in Moscow. The USSR was the other end of the nuclear “dumbbell.” Most of their metro system doubles as shelters for the masses, and the stations are ornate masterpieces. Gaining access to shelters with governmental permission proved a nightmare. So Moscow became a breaking and entering event for me. Fortunately, I didn’t end up as a Law and Order episode in Russia, although at times it was touch and go. I went around with nameless associates, and we entered shelters with bolt cutters and Allen wrenches. We opened hatches, waited until patrols went past in the darkness, hid in bushes, then lowered ourselves twenty feet with ropes under buildings such as the Moscow State University or apartment houses, climbed over transoms, and crawled through rubble. I worked mostly from 10 PM until dawn. My poor wife was forced to sit in a hotel and wait and worry.
One shelter had doors that were welded shut. We simply peeled back the corrugated steel roof and descended, only to discover that there was another entrance a few hundred feet away where people could walk in and out undiscovered. This apartment house shelter was originally built for the residents but was later converted into a listening post for the KGB. The out-of-sight entrance was used by the KGB to sneak into the underground rooms where they listened to tapped phones.
There is a pretty exciting museum in Siberia built in a bomb shelter that I think would be a great place to exhibit the photographs—again, a world of ironies.
SV: What, ultimately, do these places mean to you?
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RR: Shelters are the architecture of failure—the failure of moderation, politics, communication, diplomacy, and sustaining humanity. They represent the ultimate in optimism and belief in individual survival and paradoxically the ultimate in pessimism—the expectation of the destruction of humanity. The architects of these structures envisioned an inevitable cataclysm. It doesn’t get worse than this. That said, everything about this project is counterintuitive. I am optimistic when I find shelters that are unused and abandoned. Conversely, I am depressed when I come across shelters that are gleaming and inviting, such as some of the Swiss shelters where classes in preparedness are taught. In St. Petersburg, Russia, I photographed “The Trendy Griboyedov Club.” I found it wildly optimistic. People use these clubs—converted underground shelters—to drink, dance, and mate. This is a celebration of life rather than an anticipation of death and destruction. The club rejects the intent and purpose of its origins. Finally it made sense.