When you first see his aerial photographs, hand-tinted to give the black and white images a silvery sheen, you are struck by the intricacy of nature's design: great crisscrossed tracks in sand; mysterious spirals; a gigantic hole half filled with shadow like a terrestrial eclipse. Then you look at the captions. It turns out these are petrochemical sites, nuclear test areas, weapons storage depots. What is beautiful in the abstract and horrifying when you find out what the subject is, becomes beautifully horrifying when you attempt to hold both reactions together.

Describing his reaction when he first came upon a crater at the Yucca Flat Test Site in Nevada, an enormous gouge in the sand made by a nuclear test bomb, Gowin wrote: "This is probably one of the most poisoned places in the world. How can it be beautiful? It was as if the light didn't care and the sun didn't think."