Image above taken from the Boobytraps series (2008):

“The last series, Boobytraps, is not photographic in nature, but has every thing to do with spread ing ter ror and cre at ing an atmosphere of invisible menace that sur­rounds us everywhere and could hit any of us any time. Taken from two US Army field manuals they show soldiers how to construct boobytraps out of literally every­thing available in the world of every day objects, including pipes, beds, couches and chocolates.” (read more)

Artist’s statement about his Boobytraps series:

“I have taken these images from two books “Boobytraps” (1965) and “Unconventional Warfare Devices and Techniques - References” (1966). These are two “Army Field Manuals” of the US Army. In these books, soldiers are taught to construct boobytraps out of literally everything available. The key point of these two books is not how to detect these exploding traps but how to construct them.

The basic idea of building a trap out of - let´s say - a tea kettle is to spread terror. If a simple tea kettle might be a bomb that could kill or maim me what is there left to trust. Everything might be a bomb and therefore, in the head of the potential victim,everything IS a trap.”

See the whole Boobytraps series. The complete catalog can be dowloaded in PDF (Texts German, 3.12MB). Here is Simon Menner official website.

About Mr. Deane:

“Mrs. Deane is a blog run by Beierle + Keijser, visual artists from respectively Ger­many and Holland. It is named in after a spiritistic medium from the beginning of the 20th century. For us, Mrs. Deane stands for the ambiguous and the undecidable that one finds one selfconfronted with near the borders of the perceptible and the prob­able. Here, every man has to decide for him self what he holds to be true and what not.” (read more)

Wikimedia Commons: Bomb in Wall Street, 1920

“The Wall Street bombing occurred at 12:01 p.m. on September 16, 1920, in the Financial District of New York City. The blast killed 38 and seriously injured 143. It was more deadly than the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building in 1910 and remained the deadliest bomb attack on U.S. soil until the Bath School bombings in Bath Township, Michigan seven years later.

At noon, a wagon passed by lunchtime crowds on Wall Street in New York City and stopped across the street from the headquarters of the J.P. Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street, on the Financial District’s busiest corner. Inside, 100 pounds (45 kg) of dynamite with 500 pounds (230 kg) of heavy, cast-iron sash weights exploded in a timer-set detonation, sending the slugs tearing through the air. The horse and wagon were blasted into small fragments. The 38 victims, most of whom died within moments of the blast, were mostly young and worked as messengers, stenographers, clerks and brokers. It caused over $2 million in property damage and wrecked most of the interior spaces of the Morgan building.” (wikipedia)

From the publisher’s website:

“On a September day in 1920, an angry Italian anarchist named Mario Buda exploded a horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and iron scrap near New York’s Wall Street, killing 40 people. Since Buda’s prototype the car bomb has evolved into a “poor man’s air force,” a generic weapon of mass destruction that now craters cities from Bombay to Oklahoma City.

In this gripping and disturbing history, Mike Davis traces its worldwide use and development, in the process exposing the role of state intelligence agencies—particularly those of the United States, Israel, India, and Pakistan—in globalizing urban terrorist techniques. Davis argues that it is the incessant impact of car bombs, rather than the more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bio-terrorism, that is changing cities and urban lifestyles, as privileged centers of power increasingly surround themselves with “rings of steel” against a weapon that nevertheless seems impossible to defeat.” (more)

This book won the Lannan Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Read a short review of the book.

Artist statement (here):

“Unabomber: Ted Kaczynski, our home grown philosopher/terrorist, serving life in prison for crimes either committed out of dedication to a cause, or madness or both, had not only been extracted from his rural home but the home itself has been incarcerated. The cabin was shipped across the country to be used as evidence in his trial. My work looks at historical and contemporary artifacts (in this case the cabin and its site), and using the imagery and methods of architecture /archaeology it attempts to bridge the gap between the banal and the extraordinary, the cult of celebrity and the seductiveness of the infamous. This work was exhibited at the Henry Urbach Gallery in New York in January 1999, traveled to the Triannual of Photography in Hamburg, Germany in May of 1999 and was the subject of a one person exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art in August of 2000.”

Photo description: “Titan II ICBM in Silo 1963”

Previously on Skandalon.

“BLAST CITY : One of the scariest of all - Mutual of Omaha’s Accident Insurance diagram from Heat Flash to Partial Structural Damage - and etched on the visual imagination of the world. January 1951. An image of the respective blast zones for the Atomic Bomb and the Hydrogen Bomb, photograph September 1950. ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS, July 13 1946, full page”