November 12, 2008

• Amazing! Thanks. This prompted a colleague to tell me that he'd heard that lots of people at Hiroshima where killed by big blades of grass sucked in at hundreds of miles an hour by the blast. I'm not sure if I believe him, but it sounds good...
• Wow.
• Whoah... Thanks polychrome.
• I found this amazing, and very, very sad. Finders, keepers and all that, but I wish any or all of these three men would now have the compassion to donate these photos (and the box)to the Smithsonian or some other entity for preservation and display. Better yet, it should all go to the Japanese government.
• Powerful stuff. My hands are shaking. It's like seeing ghosts.
• Terrific post - thanks.
• Astonishing. Tearing up. Great post, polychrome.
• Can't stop the shivers up my spine. The flash mark outline of the man on the bridge I think I'll see forever in my head.
• It's strange and sad to read this. I've just been writing about Hiroshima so it's so weird to get an artistic perspective on what I've been reading about in history books. I suppose that I, too, have been putting a sort of artistic spin on the bombing, using it as a metaphor for other things, as an anchor to talk about the start of the Cold War. The thing I find interesting in this article is that they are also using the bombing as a symbol, but they're situating it in the history of design and photography. For example, when I saw the photograph of the box, my first indistinct was to ask what the meaning of the Japanese was. The writer's was to compare it to a picture of a box being sold on ebay. I'm also fascinated by the idea that the finder of these photos tried to mount them as an artistic exhibit. I've never made the connection, before, between 'found art' people and historians, but once it's made, it seems so obvious as to be almost inevitable. It makes me start to ponder the question of where the boundaries lie between history, voyeurism (historians are basically just professional gossips) and art. Clearly, these pictures were not taken as 'art' photographs, and yet some of the images seem to speak in an artistic way. The twisted staircase, for example, powerfully evokes Dali. Having said all that, I think these images should probably be donated to a university archive, if only to stop them being swallowed up by the government. The fact that they have un-cancelled classification markings probably makes them illegal to own. It would really suck to see them disappear down the national security black hole. Also, the less artistically interesting ones, as often happens, might easily prove to be the ones most useful to historians.
• Some of the images are online at the International Center of Photgraphy here.
• Excellent post. Truly haunting... Thanks for sharing, polychrome!
• There's a credit at the end: This is a longer version of an article that first appeared in the Guardian Weekend Magazine on July 16, 2005. All images used with kind permission from the International Center of Photography: "Hiroshima: The United States Strategic Bombing Survey Archive, International Center of Photography, Purchase, with funds provided by the ICP Acquisitions Committee, 2006." Says to me that these photos have found a home. What I'm wondering is where are all the _other_ strategic bombing survey photos? Digging around I've found text - see here for instance for the strategic bombing report on the Pacific war, and this scan from the Truman Library archive. Google Images doesn't seem to help either.
• Thanks for your thoughts too Dreadnought - perspective and context...as the article says, it's striking how little imagery there is for some key events.
• These pictures remind me of one of the most powerful and moving poems I have ever read: The Horse Philip Levine for Ichiro Kawamoto, humanitarian, electrician, & survivor of Hiroshima They spoke of the horse alive without skin, naked, hairless, without eyes and ears, searching for the stableboy’s caress. Shoot it, someone said, but they let him go on colliding with tattered walls, butting his long skull to pulp, finding no path where iron fences corkscrewed in the street and bicycles turned like question marks. Some fled and some sat down. The river burned all that day and into the night, the stones sighed a moment and were still, and the shadow of a man’s hand entered a leaf. The white horse never returned, and later they found the stable boy, his back crushed by a hoof, his mouth opened around a cry that no one heard. They spoke of the horse again and again; their mouths opened like the gills of a fish caught above water. Mountain flowers burst from the red clay walls, and they said a new life was here. Raw grass sprouted from the cobbles like hair from a deafened ear. The horse would never return. There had been no horse. I could tell from the way they walked testing the ground for some cold that the rage had gone out of their bones in one mad dance.
• Wow. Just wow...