John Auer, Class of 2023
Environmental Studies and Economics
Dmitri Baltermants, The Uniform of the Atomic Age, ca. 1965. Gelatin silver print. 2016.46.13
In addition to pursuing a degree in Environmental Studies, I also major in Economics. My study of economies, labor, and development in conjunction with the environment informed my selection of Dmitri Baltermants’s photograph The Uniform of theAtomic Age (ca. 1965) and Joe Jones’s painting Handling Pipe (ca. 1944–1945). These works of art illuminate the intersection between the environment and economic progress—or regression.   
Dmitri Baltermants was a Soviet photographer who spent much of his career recording daily life and war in eastern Europe. Through this lens, Uniform of the Atomic Age captures a moment of pride in Soviet technological advancement and optimism for the future. To my eyes, however, Baltermants conveys anxiety surrounding a global struggle for economic superiority and the environmental costs associated with it. As the Cold War loomed large in American culture and politics of the mid-twentieth century, so too did the dangers of nuclear power.  Through the subject’s space-age-like suit and somber expression, Baltermants captures the fear people felt at the possibility of a political and economic standoff spiraling into nuclear war, devastating for both human life and the environment.
Joe Jones, Handling Pipe, ca. 1944–1945. Oil on canvas. 1951.27
Similar toBaltermants’s nod at impending catastrophe, Joe Jones’s Handling Pipe also alludes to an environmental disaster but more subtly. While the theme of labor is apparent in Jones’s work, his subjects are not assembling just any pipes. Jones was commissioned by the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey in the 1940s to depict the complexities of oil extraction. The men in the painting are constructing an oil rig. While the environmental flags raised by this work may not have been obvious to a popular audience in the mid-twentieth century, today oil drilling—and fossil fuel extraction more broadly—is at the center of the environmental movement and understood to be a key contributor to global climate change. Through an environmentally conscious lens, then, viewers today can discern new layers of significance in the work of both Baltermants and Jones.