Hiroshima: The Lost Photographs
November 11th, 2008Via: Design Observer:
One rainy night eight years ago, in Watertown, Massachusetts, a man was taking his dog for a walk. On the curb, in front of a neighbor’s house, he spotted a pile of trash: old mattresses, cardboard boxes, a few broken lamps. Amidst the garbage he caught sight of a battered suitcase. He bent down, turned the case on its side and popped the clasps.
He was surprised to discover that the suitcase was full of black-and-white photographs. He was even more astonished by their subject matter: devastated buildings, twisted girders, broken bridges — snapshots from an annihilated city. He quickly closed the case and made his way back home.
At the kitchen table, he looked through the photographs again and confirmed what he had suspected. He was looking at something he had never seen before: the effects of the first use of the Atomic bomb. The man was looking at Hiroshima.
In a dispassionate and scientific style, the seven hundred and one photographs inside the suitcase catalogued a city seared by a new form of warfare. The origin and purpose of the photographs were a mystery to the man who found them that night. Now, over sixty years after the bombing of Hiroshima, their story can be told.
On August 6, 1945 at 8:15am, a silver B-29 airplane called the Enola Gay (named after the pilot Paul Tibbets’ mother) dropped a uranium bomb. Although exact numbers have never been agreed upon, one hundred and ten thousand civilians and twenty thousand military personnel are said to have died in Hiroshima, many of them instantly vaporized in the heat of the blast or burnt to death by the fireball which immediately swept through the city. Thousands more would die in the following months and years as a result of sickness caused by radiation.
Thirty-one days after the blast, a team of U.S. scientists flew over the city. “There was just one enormous, flat, rust-red scar, and no green or grey” Philip Morrison told The New Yorker in 1946, “because there were no roofs or vegetation left. I was pretty sure then that nothing I was going to see later would give me as much of a jolt.”
The world has very few photographs of what gave Morrison that unforgettable jolt. This is no accident. On September 18, 1945, just over a month after Japan had surrendered, the U.S. Government imposed a strict code of censorship on the newly defeated nation. It read, in part: “nothing shall be printed which might, directly or by inference, disturb public tranquility.”
Thanks for posting this. I remember very well the Guardian magazine article from a few years ago. A very haunting series of images indeed.
I also recall a magazine piece, I think it was in the Sunday Times magazine a few years earlier, about the only guy to have survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts. There were lots of memorable parts of that guy’s story, but the most memorable was his account of how he came to be caught up in both blasts. Working in Nagasaki, he was away on a trip to Hiroshima when the first bomb was exploded. Dragging himself out of the remnants of the city, he eventually made it to a phone and called his boss in Nagasaki to explain why he would not be in work. His boss refused to believe his account of what had happened, and ordered him back to work in Nagasaki. So the guy does as he is told, only to get bombed again.
Last I read a few years back he was still alive, fighting off various types of cancer. I remember wondering if a small part of him had wanted his boss in Nagasaki to survive the blast, just so he could tell him ‘See? I told you.’
And WE are worried about the REST of the world having weapons of mass destruction?
EDIT: In the interests of full disclosure….
I got interested in the story again and did a bit more research. Turns out that there are at least 165 survivors of both atomic attacks, 9 of whom were actually survivors of both blast zones. So it wasn’t just the one guy as I had thought. Survivors of a blast are termed ‘hibakusha’, and survivors of both blasts are called the ‘nijyuu hibakusha’.
What an incredible shared experience to have though.