FREO photographer Brett Leigh Dicks spent five years visiting highly restricted sites across the US for his latest exhibition Nuclear Landscapes.

He took photos of 150 nuclear-related locations and captured a desolate yet hauntingly beautiful world that had everything from uranium mines and test sites to nuclear reactors and missile bases.

• Some of the eerie photos in Brett Leigh Dicks’ exhibition Nuclear Landscapes.

“I visited the former site of Chicago Pile-1, the world’s first artificial nuclear reactor and the first technological breakthrough in the Manhattan Project,” Leigh Dicks says.

“It’s buried under a plaque in a forest just outside of Chicago which seemed like an inauspicious end to something so significant to the course of world history.

“I was able to get inside locations such as the Los Alamos and Oak Ridge laboratories along with the Nevada and Trinity test sites and I found them to be as fascinating as they were overwhelming.

“Then there was an old Najavo miner I met who toured me around abandoned Cold war-era uranium mines, all of which are still leaking radiation into the environment and surrounding communities.

“It was an emotional rollercoaster of a project.”

An American ex-pat who immigrated to Australia in 2019, Leigh Dicks says the catalyst for the exhibition was the “hauntingly beautiful” song Sonic Wind, written by his buddy in Tucson, Arizona.

It was about an old nuclear missile base located just south of the city. 

“We went and checked it out and I learned Tucson was once ringed by a dozen ICBM bases,” Leigh Dicks says.

“I was curious as to what happens to these facilities once they reach their use-by date, which led to a series called Opposing Forces, where I explored abandoned US and Soviet missile bases.

“That inturn led to questions about where the uranium for the warheads came from, how it was processed, and what happened to it when the weapons were decommissioned.

“Those questions introduced me into America’s larger nuclear legacy and the associated triumphs and tragedies it entailed.”

After spending the past few summers criss-crossing America and travelling tens of thousands of miles, Leigh Dicks returned to Australia and whittled down his nuclear-related snaps to 30 large-scale colour photos for the exhibition.

“I stayed and ate in enough seedy motels and greasy diners to last a lifetime,” he quips.

He’s divided the exhibition into six themes – mining, processing, testing, military, power, and waste – each featuring five locations.

“I spoke with nuclear scientists at a reactor doing significant work in nuclear medicine and others working on recycling fuel rods which was incredibly inspiring,” he says.

“It’s quite heavy subject matter and being onsite at some significant locations of world history solicited a range of emotions.

“And the emotional response varied from site to site.”

Leigh Dicks was a finalist in the 2025 Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture, and his work has appeared alongside Win Wenders in the US exhibition The Magnetic West.

Another recent Leigh Dicks project was a photo essay on Lunch Bars in WA.

He clearly has a gift for turning the ghosts of yesteryear into something strange and yet slightly beautiful.

Nuclear Landscapes is on September 13 – 28 at Moores Building Art Space on Henry St in Fremantle.

For more info see brettleighdicks.net.

For more photos and the extended version of this interview see our Online Extra! at fremantleherald.com.

by STEPHEN POLLOCK