Creative Shortlist

This series explores the photographer’s ancestors' experience of living on a dairy farm downwind of the Nevada Test Site in the USA, where thousands of nuclear bombs were detonated in the 1950s. Milk provides a sense of familial unity; it is the life-sustaining liquid critical to a baby's survival and a key signifier of maternal nurturance. However, in the 1950s, thousands of people were exposed to radionuclides through milk. The portraits in this series reference campaigns from the 1980s that printed images of missing people on milk cartons, combining personal, social and political issues to examine an ongoing nuclear legacy.