Between 1945 and 1963 the United States detonated more than two hundred nuclear devices in the atmosphere — over the Pacific atolls, in the Nevada desert, at high altitude above the South Atlantic. Each was given a name. I collect and work with the photographs made of that programme, on the conviction that these images — nuclear testing, rocketry, spaceflight, scientific research, civil defence — belong to a single, interconnected history of how a century pictured its own power. That conviction is the Strangelove Collection, my archive of original vintage photography from the nuclear and space age. The register that follows draws one strand from it: the prints of the atmospheric tests themselves. These are not reproductions but the prints made at the time, by the institutions that documented the American nuclear programme: the Atomic Energy Commission, the Defense Atomic Support Agency, the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and Lookout Mountain Laboratory, the classified U.S. Air Force film studio hidden in the Hollywood Hills. The black-and-white prints were sometimes released as press material; the colour prints, made in far smaller numbers, were representational objects — hung in senior officers’ offices or kept for documentation, rarely seen outside those circles. I have gathered these prints one at a time, over many years. They surface slowly, as the estates of the scientists and military personnel who once held them are dispersed — through auction houses, online sales, and sometimes the families directly. Each is scarce, and assembling them is patient, uncertain work. But the collecting is only where the work begins. What I work with is what these objects withhold as much as what they show: the print whose official caption misnames the shot, the verso stamped and then censored, the detonation no camera was ever allowed to record. In exhibitions and in this register, the archive and its silences are the subject, not only the tests. The register is necessarily partial, and the gaps are part of what it shows: only a fraction of the tests was ever photographed for public record, and classification, destroyed files, and remote sites kept much of this history invisible. But these were never neutral records. The images were made to project power — to reassure a public, to impress allies, to signal dominance — and most stayed classified, seen by almost no one outside the circles that commissioned them. To gather and show them now, as nuclear weapons return to open political argument, is to keep visible a history that was built to stay hidden, and to let it be looked at on terms other than the ones that made it.