In Dairy For The Downwinders, I explore my ancestors’ experience living downwind of the Nevada Test Site. Between 1951 and 1992, over one thousand nuclear tests were detonated in the Nevada desert. My ancestors lived and worked on a dairy farm and consumed milk from cows that grazed on land contaminated by nuclear fallout. Two of my great-uncles died of myeloid leukemia, a cancer with known ties to nuclear testing.

Milk authors a sense of familial unity. It is the essential life-sustaining liquid critical to a baby’s survival—something linked to maternal nurturance. But in the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of children across the U.S. were exposed to radionuclides through milk because of nuclear testing.

The portraits refer to campaigns from the 1980s that featured images of missing people on milk cartons. Although the campaign was largely unsuccessful, it left a mark on our collective memory.

Using family photographs, I create portraits on glass milk jars with liquid light by applying silver-gelatin emulsion directly to the surface and developing each piece by hand in the darkroom. This materially fragile process allows the image to emerge through physical contact with archival images, chemistry, and time.