In After Hiroshima, American artist elin o’Hara slavick attempts to address the aftermath of the 1945 bombing--historically, poetically and visually. This act of ethical seeing “brings to us with harrowing clarity … what may lie ahead if we cannot cure ourselves of the pathology that has brought us this far." --Noam Chomsky

elin o’Hara slavick is a Professor of Visual Art, Theory and Practice at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BA from Sarah Lawrence College. Slavick has exhibited her work internationally [and is the author of Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography, with a foreword by Howard Zinn and essay by Carol Mayor in addition to After Hiroshima]. She is also a curator, critic and activist.


James Elkins grew up in Ithaca, New York, separated from Cornell University by a quarter-mile of woods once owned by the naturalist Laurence Palmer.

He stayed on in Ithaca long enough to get the BA degree (in English and Art History), with summer hitchhiking trips to Alaska, Mexico, Guatemala, the Caribbean, and Columbia. For the last twenty-five years he has lived in Chicago; he got a graduate degree in painting, and then switched to Art History, got another graduate degree, and went on to do the PhD in Art History, which he finished in 1989. (All from the University of Chicago.) Since then he has been teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism.

His writing focuses on the history and theory of images in art, science, and nature. Some of his books are exclusively on fine art (What Painting Is, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?). Others include scientific and non-art images, writing systems, and archaeology (The Domain of Images, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them), and some are about natural history (How to Use Your Eyes).

Text by: James Elkins