At Wendover Air Base, on the Utah–Nevada line, the hangar that readied the bomber carrying the Hiroshima bomb still stands, abandoned. Mark Klett photographs the structure and the objects around it at close range: a broken windowpane, a bent nail, .50-caliber bullets recovered from a machine-gun range. Dana Jennings, writing in The New York Times, described these fragments as standing in for Wendover, just as the base stands in for the birth of nuclear destruction. Wendover, once the world’s largest installation of its kind, crumbles from neglect, and what it held belongs to a history no one dares to forget.

Klett’s partnership with the writer William L. Fox gives the book its structure. Klett’s photography has long examined landscape, history, and the passage of time; Fox writes on human cognition and memory. Together they made what the publisher calls a visual and verbal multi-layered portrait of the base and of the experience of memory in relation to the American military’s use of the atomic bomb in the Second World War. The premise is cyclical rather than commemorative: the stories and relics at Wendover describe not only the past but a present filled with new apprehensions.

Radius Books published the book as a hardcover of 160 pages with 70 images. The title’s scientific metaphor is exact—half-life measures time by what lingers, not by the moment of the event—and the book’s method follows from it. The attention falls on what a site leaves behind, and the sequence asks the reader to connect these modest details to their consequences.

For a collector, the collaboration is the first point of interest: a photographer and a writer whose concerns meet at memory, producing a portrait in two registers, image and text, rather than a single-voiced record. The second is the book’s sustained inquiry into how a place holds and loses its history, carried out at a site tied to the first use of the atomic bomb in warfare.