Although exact numbers have never been agreed, something in the order of 140,000 people died within moments of that log entry, many of them vaporized in the heat of the blast or burnt to death by the fireball that swept through the city. Thousands more would die in the following months and years as a result of sickness caused by radiation.
Given the magnitude of the event, and its immense historical significance, we have few photographs of post-bomb Hiroshima. This is no accident. On September 18, 1945, just over a month after Japan surrendered, the U.S. government imposed a strict code of censorship. They suppressed the few images taken by Japanese photographers and banned all non-military photographs of the city, the original Ground Zero (this was the first time the phrase was used).
When we think of Hiroshima and what comes to mind is the mushroom cloud. Awesome in its way, with its bulbous head and towering stem, it is nonetheless an abstract image freed from human agency and human consequence.
The lack of visual evidence of the atom bomb’s effect has helped us to forget its devastating impact. To see is to remember. Up until now, there have been few publicly available images of what happened on the ground when the first atomic bomb exploded. As a result, Hiroshima has become, as the novelist Mary McCarthy wrote in 1946, “a kind of hole in human history.”