Eye Magazine

The Nuclear Sublime by Michael Collins is a photobook of pictures that Collins took inside nuclear power stations, a slow-paced sequence of industrial interiors in which every element is in sharp focus. The spreads – captions on the left, pictures to the right – are interspersed with full bleed details, sensitively art-directed by Richard Krzyzak. Collins achieves a once unattainable depth of field in these mesmerising digital photographs through ‘focus-stacking’, exposing numerous frames in succession, each focused progressively further back. The separate frames are then compiled into a final, high-resolution image in which every part of the composition is rendered in pin-sharp detail.

Colourful and unpopulated, the photos, yet to be exhibited at large size in a gallery, are the result of Collins’ patient, challenging visits to a host of mostly British nuclear sites. No human figures cross his compositions, though their traces are ever present. Some scenes imply that drama is about to unfold, like a set for an opera about Three Mile Island. Others are more humdrum, with an office chair or abandoned Henry vacuum cleaner; or weirdly chic, like a Lynchian film set in an underground club. The typography of arcane analogue controls has its own graphic fascination, as does the patterning of symbols, buttons, lights and levers. The oblique icons shot in the main control room of Sizewell A, by the Suffolk coast, are complemented by orange stickers that state ‘Terminally disconnected’ in narrow capitals. The turbine hall and adjoining structures at Sizewell A were safely demolished in the spring of 2025.

The manic, almost whimsical repetition of valves, controls and meters in ITER, the ‘International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor’ in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, southeast France, seem adjacent to dystopian science fiction, the product of a mind like that of a novelist or illustrator, say William Gibson or Tom Gauld …

John L. Walters, editor of Eye, London

Read the full version in Eye no. 109 vol. 28, 2025