August 3, 2018
CBC News
An Australian photographer is bringing images of the Cold War to Ottawa’s own monument to the era: the Diefenbunker.
Brett Leigh Dicks said he’s fascinated by bunkers, missile silos and other relics of the time and spent the last 20 years documenting them with his camera.
“I was born in the early part of the ’60s so my entire childhood was spent during the cold war and all that tension,” he told CBC Radio’s All In A Day.
After first touring abandoned silos near Tucson, Arizona, he wanted to see more places left behind.
“I just became obsessed with them.”
In the U.S., some sites have been decommissioned and in many cases turned over to private hands, he said. The former Soviet Union simply walked away from many of their sites, which have since been converted to new uses.
“Everything ranging from paintball fields to meth labs,” he said.