The Elephant's Foot

The Elephant’s Foot is a fictional project based on real nuclear accidents that has happened throughout the last decades.

What hasn’t happened, but could. 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 its 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.