Sale 2683 - Lot 248

Oppenheimer, J. Robert (1904-1967)
Photo Album Commemorating his Return to the Los Alamos Laboratory.

Los Alamos, NM: post-18 May 1964.

Quarto format album containing 30 black-and-white photographs of Oppenheimer's visit to Los Alamos Laboratory on 18 May 1964; with blue plastic comb binding; 10 1/2 x 8 in.

Almost twenty years after the Trinity test and three years before his death, Oppenheimer returned to the Los Alamos Laboratory. This album commemorates his visit to the laboratory's museum with his wife, Kitty, and documents his reunion with Norris Bradbury (1909-1997), who succeeded Oppenheimer as the lab's director. It contains many images of Oppenheimer touring the facility, visiting the museum with Bradbury, and screening films of his former activities there. Four striking images show Oppenheimer with a photograph of the Trinity test looming in the background. The opening page features a dissolve with his trademark hat laid alongside the laboratory's logbook where Oppenheimer signed in as a visitor. Many of the photographs show the scientist talking and laughing with his former colleagues, his wife, and others. The final four were taken during an evening lecture on the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics, at the Civic Auditorium in Los Alamos High School. On this occasion, Oppenheimer reportedly, "received a standing ovation as he approached the lectern and again when he finished his speech." (The Atom, June 1964).