Photographer Who Took Famous Photo of Oppenheimer Honored With Statue

A life-sized statue of the official photographer for the Manhattan Project has been unveiled in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Unveiled this week, the statue of Ed Westcott stands six feet, six inches tall and weighs 250 pounds. It sits outside the Oak Ridge History Museum, which has long relied on Westcott’s photographs of the city — a city built during World War II specifically for the development of the atomic bomb.

“He was the only one in the early days able to have a camera,” Don Hunnicutt, vice president of the Oak Ridge Heritage and Preservation Association and museum historian, tells WATE. “He was just the type of person who would be able to take a photograph and tell a story.”

Westcott’s extensive photos documenting Oak Ridge were once classified, but roughly 5,000 of his negatives are looked after by the National Archives in Washington.

Arguably his most famous photo is a 1946 portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory and subject of a 2023 Christopher Nolan movie.

According to Westcott’s Wikipedia entry, the portrait of Oppenheimer is hailed for depicting a weary-looking Oppenheimer just a year after his incredible scientific breakthrough effectively ended World War II.

“When he met with Oppenheimer, Westcott learned that the physicist wanted a cigarette but lacked the change to buy some,” the Wikipedia entry says.

“After Westcott gave him the money he needed, Oppenheimer bought his cigarettes and lit one. Westcott then captured the image of the physicist sitting next to a fireplace mantel in the Oak Ridge Guest House, holding the freshly lit cigarette in his hand.”

During the Manhattan Project, Westcott used either a Speed Graphic or an 8×10 Deardorff view camera. He was the 29th employee hired in Oak Ridge, where he worked and lived as an official government photographer from 1942 to 1966.

When the U.S. government was preparing to reveal the news about the first atomic bomb and the Manhattan Project that had created it in secret, 18 of Westcott’s photographs were printed clandestinely before being declassified and sent to the media.

Westcott also processed photos in the lab that were taken by damage assessment teams. They were so sensitive that armed guards stood by the door of the darkroom.

Westcott died in Oak Ridge age 97 in 2019.

Image credits: Via Wikimedia Commons