Berlyn Brixner

Berlyn B. Brixner (May 21, 1911 – August 1, 2009) was an American photographer. He was the head photographer for the Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear weapon in July 1945. Brixner was positioned 10,000 yards (9,100 m) away from the explosion and had 50 cameras of varying speeds running from different locations to capture the shot in full motion.

Early years

He was born in El Paso, Texas on May 21, 1911. His mother had graduated from Western New Mexico University in 1898 and taught school in various small southern New Mexico communities. His father was a power systems engineer for a mining company, and had worked in Chile, Mexico and the Fanny Mine in Mogollon, New Mexico until the Army commandeered its boxcar-size generators at the beginning of World War II turning Mogollon into a ghost town.

On December 11, 1932, he fell into Kilbourne Hole near Lanark, New Mexico and broke his ankle.

Brixner attended the University of Texas at Austin for four years without earning a degree, then worked and studied photography under Willis W. Waite, who operated a pathology laboratory in El Paso. In 1936, Brixner worked as a regional photographer with the Soil Conservation Service at its four-state headquarters in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He married his first wife, Betty, around 1940. His two daughters, Annette (born 1942) and Kathleen (born 1943) were born in Albuquerque. During World War II, he was hired at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to work on photography problems connected with the Manhattan Project in the Optics Engineering and High Speed Photography Group in Los Alamos under the direction of Professor Julian Mack, the group invented and constructed extremely high speed cameras.