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The Elephant's Foot
Edward Nurton

The invisible and yet incapacitating. The fear of radiation has long fueled the imagination, driving the need for stories of redress and warning. Nausea. Headache. Vomiting. Incapacitation. What happens to a body once it's exposed to radiation? The Elephant’s Foot is a fictional project based on real nuclear accidents that has happened throughout the last decades. Set in uncertain locations and times, its departure is from a small town on the banks of a contaminated river, and follows how radioactive exposure impacts the human body, society and the natural as a whole. The images created by the author are the result of deep immersion in the study of a number of real-life radiation accidents. The project’s fictive drive allows photographer Edward Nurton to play with space and time, questioning how these events have unfolded and why they’re so prone to secrecy, paranoia and indeed cover-up. Though based heavily on investigation, Nurton presents the story within the frame of a sci-fi script he has developed, making it a dystopian story albeit one wholly true to real events. By interrogating details, one can parse that everything has a reference – may it be the date of a disaster, the location of a town, or a man's bodily injuries.”

Edward Nurton is an author and educator who works with the photographic medium. His work is an exploratory journey of the self that revolves around the motifs of nostalgic longing for the past and anticipation of the unknown future. Nurton’s photography is both real and unreal: reflected in mundane objects and experiences, it evokes the eternal and existential, through its attention to detail. Its unreal-ness is formed by its ephemerality, a dream-like journey into the unconscious, while its realism is reflected through the use of archive images. Revolving around the themes of chimeric family heritage, childhood memories, and identity, Edward’s work approaches subjectivity both as the main theme and as a transformative process that connects the artist and the audience.​

déréal digital 2025
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