Carole Gallagher was born in New York City, seven miles from Times Square, on July 16, 1950, the fifth anniversary of the first detonation of an atomic bomb: Trinity, at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The Nuclear Age and the Cold War, she later speculated, enabled a type of globalized emotional abuse of children who were engaging in futile "Duck and Cover" exercises in their schools regularly, fearing they could die in a global thermonuclear war at any moment, for the entirety of their childhood.When she was 8 years old, an aunt taught her how to print a photograph. In her teens Gallagher became an artist, photographer, and writer. She did her graduate work in fine arts at Hunter College of the City University of New York, and in 1977 began teaching photography at one of the city's community colleges and at a private women's college in Westchester. Concurrent with her teaching career, she became a widely-exhibited artist, with two shows at the prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery in New York as well as museums in Europe and the United States.In 1981, two phrases she encountered in her readings set her life in a new direction. While studying a biography of the American photographer Dorothea Lange, she discovered that the following thought by Francis Bacon had always been pinned to her darkroom door: "The contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention." She had been researching the nuclear military-industrial complex since 1979, when 10,000 pages of declassified top secret papers from the Atomic Energy Commission had been released to the public, and came across a disturbing memo from the AEC which noted that the people living downwind of the recently opened (1951) Nevada Nuclear Test Site were "a low-use segment of the population," expendable in the pursuit of nuclear superiority over what was then the U.S.S.R.By 1983 Gallagher had moved to St. George, Utah to research, investigate and document the effects of nuclear tests on atomic veterans, test site workers, and people living downwind. In 1988 she was awarded a grant to finish her book, "American Ground Zero," by the MacArthur Foundation's Program for Research and Writing in International Peace and Security. In 1989 she began teaching photojournalism in the Communication Department of the University of Utah, as well as being a visiting professor of fine art photography in the Art Department there.American Ground Zero: the Secret Nuclear War was published by The MIT Press and later by Random House, at the direction of publisher Sir Harold Evans, "as an act of conscience." A traveling companion exhibition was organized by the International Center of Photography in New York with seven museum venues in the United States. The exhibition also traveled to London, Kazakhstan and Hiroshima. Gallagher's photographs and essays have been widely exhibited and published in the decades since.Studs Terkel remarked that, "This is more than a cautionary tale. It is a revelation of something apocalyptic. The Soviet Union was condemned by the world for keeping Chernobyl a three-day secret. Our nuclear bomb tests in Nevada were kept a thirty-year secret. Our respected scientists, engineers, and administrations were the guilty parties and we, the American people, were kept wholly ignorant of peril without precedent." The Los Angeles Times Book Review noted "Gallagher's discipline in becoming 'a blank slate upon which the stories and images could be written' has resulted in a document of immense authority and humane urgency." Herbert Mitgang reviewed it for The New York Times: "As you look at Carole Gallagher's powerful pictures and read her angry words, you may be reminded of James Agee's 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men' ... Ms. Gallagher's book deserves to be read as a crusading story of the consequences of the nuclear-arms industry's lingering contamination and deception: as an American Chernobyl."See website, http://www.carolegallagher.info/index.htm, for more information.