THE STRANGELOVE COLLECTION (2009-ongoing)
Since 2009, Peter Voigt has been collecting vintage photographs. He now owns more than a thousand old originals depicting nuclear research, the development of the atom bomb and the United States’ first rockets. They were taken during the nineteen thirties and the nineteen seventies. They are press images, for instance, about how you can survive a nuclear attack, or photographs that national laboratories commissioned to document their activities. The childish enthusiasm and the scientific innocence displayed in the photographs can be viewed as the blueprint for contemporary scientific expeditions to unknown territories. In the current transition from paper to digital archives, many of the unique images have landed on the free market indirectly – first entire archives were sold, after which their new owners broke them down into pieces.
