This piece is a collaboration between Patrick Nagatani and Andree Tracey.

Original image installed and photographed in Frankfurt, West Germany, 1986. Dye-transfer edition produced in 1989 and printed by Eliot Porter's printer in Santa Fe, NM by Robert Widdicombe.

The represented photograph includes two rows of three men each, wearing goggles, white shirts, ties and dark pants, seated in Adirondack chairs and holding Polaroid cameras. All the men in Alamogordo Blues are painted blue, the cold blue of death. "There was a chill which was not the morning cold," said physicist I.I. Rabi. The wind blowing into their faces--hair and neckties flying back--so they cannot catch their breath, blue being a symptom of asphyxiation, a variation of the "blue baby syndrome," symbolic of those children born of and into the Nuclear Age.

Patrick Nagatani (b. 1945) received his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has made his home in New Mexico and turned his attention to this region’s atomic history in the series Nuclear Enchantment. His work has recently been presented in one-person exhibitions at The Albuquerque Museum; the California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside; CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Isla Center for the Arts at the University of Guam, Mangilao; and at the Royal Photographic Society, Bath, England, among other venues. Nagatani has received numerous honors and awards for his work. His monographs include Nuclear Enchantment (1991) and Patrick Nagatani/Andree Tracey: Polaroid 20 × 24 photographs: 1983—1986 (1987).

Andree Tracey (b. 1948) is a fine art painter and photographer whose works have been widely exhibited and collected, including such venues as the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Tracey has spent a number of years working in Los Angeles where she was inspired by the tropical light, the "anything can happen here" mentality and the fantasy of Hollywood's cinematic culture. Her graphic art clients include Frankie & Johnny, Target, American Express, Smith & Hawkin, Macy's, BMW, Purina, Hormel and others.