Pictures Of Hiroshima

Elliott Erwitt: Personal Best/Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945, International ...

Two coinciding exhibitions at the International Center of Photography are so different in subject and sensibility that passing from one into the other requires a mental recalibration. Elliott Erwitt’s sprawling Personal Best , a trove of the artist’s favourites from his long and illustrious career, seduces with humour, charm and intelligence. The compact Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945 repels and fascinates, controverting Erwitt’s good will with its ugly, powerful portrait of an unpeopled and obliterated city.

Gleaned from a government analysis of the atomic bomb’s effect on concrete, wood and steel, this catalogue of devastation was meant to be seen only by postwar architects and engineers tasked with erecting the “bombproof” cities of the future. Erwitt celebrates life, wit and beauty; the Hiroshima archive mutely mourns the absent dead. The Hiroshima photos have a strange and contorted history. In the mid-1990s, the owner of a diner in Watertown, Massachusetts, was out walking his dog when he spotted a beat-up suitcase lying in a pile of trash. The photographs inside, it turned out, had once belonged to Robert L. Corsbie, an engineer and expert on the effects of the bomb, who was killed in a house fire in 1967.

Just how those photos wound up in his possession remains unclear. Corsbie belonged to the Strategic Bombing Survey, a cadre of ordnance experts, engineers, photographers and draftsmen who were sent by President Truman to analyse the nuclear devastation. Their aim, as SBS vice-chairman Paul Nitze described it 40 years later, was “to measure as precisely as possible” the physical effects of the bomb – “to put calipers on it, instead of describing it in emotive terms . . . to put quantitative numbers on something that was considered immeasurable”.

The team’s empirical mission seems to have rendered the photographs eerily mute. There are no people, only twisted metal, blistered walls and miles of rubble. But for a few skeletal structures poking out of flattened wreckage, the city simply vanished. “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city,” wrote Wilfred Burchett, a journalist who sneaked in on September 2, the day of the formal surrender. “It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence.” That wasn’t just a nuclear phenomenon; Japanese city centres, made mostly of wood, simply went up in smoke when bombed.

The Hiroshima photos are fundamentally different from more familiar pictures of European cities, such as Cologne, where the stones of the cathedral rise from the debris, and blown-out buildings loom like hollow-eyed zombies. Those ruins have a perverse but palpable grandeur, a gothic desolation that is missing from Japan’s ravaged emptiness.

Time Stands Still in Hiroshima

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is jarring.

Everything was going fine when I was perusing the history section in the preliminary three floored building. I peered with solemn interest at the frozen clocks and studied the diagrams of the city before and after destruction. However when I made it through that skinny hallway leading to halls about the personal human suffering, I had to pass. Maybe it was because I had been here twice before, but somehow I just didn’t have it in me to process those horrible images of melted skin or wailing victims again.

The first time I visited the museum by myself, I read every plaque and digested the information. My second tour was about 6 weeks ago on my Japan by Bicycle adventure. This time, I respectfully walked through to the end of the exhibit where you sign your name and leave a comment.

I understand that the suffering was real, and I appreciate the efforts that have been spent to document and communicate this singular event in history. Equally, it’s my opinion that learning from such terrible times is important and I am glad such museums exist. However, I also believe that it’s not necessary, and even somewhat unhealthy, to dwell too long on such horrors. If you haven’t been to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, I encourage you to go. Bring some tissues and be prepared for vivid insight into the suffering of the atomic victims.

In February we visited Nagasaki and went to the Peace Park and Atomic Bomb Museum there. While walking around Hiroshima this past weekend, I realized that I was comparing the two places. It was really hard not to have certain expectations about what would be displayed in the museum. In the end, it was the powerful stories of the victims that made me stop comparing and just reflect on the tragedy of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. Seeing the pictures and reading about the intense human suffering that occurred was difficult, but I’m glad that I saw it because it certainly makes me appreciate living in a peaceful area.

The museum doesn’t allow flashes and is rather dim in terms of exposure settings. With this in mind I focused in on the details of the display cases where the light was brightest. Also, many of the information walls have interesting lighting which makes for some great silhouette shots of people reading them if you take a few steps back out of the flow of traffic. With a tripod you may even capture some fantastic long exposure motion blur shots of crowds shuffling past the exhibits. Let me know if you try this since I wasn’t able to do it myself.

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New Scientist