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They also provide a rich visual heritage today. Images of human suffering and flagrant injustice galvanized activists, politicians and voters to pursue change. But certainly, there exists here what the historian Wendy Lower calls, “the presence of absence.” By way of contrast, we know how incredibly important photography was to the American Civil Rights movement. How might these photographs have changed and challenged American debate about nuclear weapons? We don’t know. A clock, hang on the wall, stopped at 8:10 = Photographed in mid-September 1945. The wall of the Hiroshima East Police Station in Shimoyanagi-cho, Hiroshima City. However, they have remained unpublished, and largely unknown in America. Today, such images form a bedrock of Japanese public memory about the atomic bombings. It was the beginning of what the sociologist Akiko Hashimoto has termed a “memory boom” in Japan.
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The feature caused a sensation with over 700,000 copies being sold within weeks. First, The Asahi Graph featured a set of images by Matushige and Yamahata.
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In 1952, when the Americans left, a series of books and magazine articles appeared almost instantaneously. In response, many Japanese photographers hid their negatives in lockers and trunks, even under their porches. American forces subsequently confiscated photographs and prohibited their publication. From the American perspective, details of the human suffering that resulted from atomic bombings were military secrets and a threat to public order in occupied Japan. Others followed in the ensuring weeks before the American occupation ramped up and clamped down. Yosuke Yamahata, was in Nagasaki by August 10, the day after the second blast and clambered over the dead and dying, increasingly alarmed by the carnage he witnessed, as he made his way to the blast hypocenter. For example, Yoshito Matsushige woke up bloodied on the floor of his house in Hiroshima and got to work two hours after the first blast on August 6. Japanese photographers were quick to document the atomic bombings in their immediate aftermath. 6, 1945.Credit: Gonichi Kimura/Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum T he mushroom cloud near Hiroshima’s ground zero after the atomic bombing on Aug. Americans talk about them so passively, as if they just ‘fell’ from the sky.” “They were used by someone on someone else. “You see Ben, the bombs didn’t ‘fall.’ They were deployed, used, thrown,” explained a member of the ANPM to me while visiting Hiroshima in 2018. During his keynote address, Obama referred to the bombs as “terror fell from the skies.” This remark unfortunately offended many of the Hibakusha (Japanese survivors of the bombings). The title of both the book and exhibit is taken from a speech made by President Barack Obama in 2015 when he became first American president to visit Hiroshima. The photographs also form the basis for the Briscoe’s recent publication Flash of Light, Wall of Fire. Donated by the Anti-Nuclear Photographer’s Movement of Japan (ANPM) a selection of these images are currently on display at the center until January 28. In 2020, an extensive collection of atomic bombing photographs was acquired by UT Austin’s Briscoe Center for American History.
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“Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected.” – George Orwell, 1945.