Right after the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima, the US government banned all images of its aftermath for decades. No one knew what the buildings and people looked like after the blast. It was the very first time that someone used the term “Ground Zero.”
What the rest of the world didn’t know at the time was that a team called the US Strategic Bombing Survey went to Japan eight weeks after the bombs dropped. Among them were seven photographers who captured the destruction. The result was an extensive series of 1,100 cold and calculating images.
The Japanese people, dead or alive, were not in any of the photos. After all, their aim wasn’t to observe “civilian damage.” The mission was two-fold: 1) to meticulously document how much structural destruction the bomb caused and 2) to figure out how to safeguard America from a similar attack. So, if there was a photograph of a school blown to smithereens, the report didn’t say “hundreds of schoolchildren died instantly.” Instead, it would note (quite matter-of-factly) that it was a concrete building, facing the Northwest, approximately 2 kilometers from the center of the blast, for example.
These intricate glimpses into a major wartime event were lost, until a man walking his dog in Massachusetts found a suitcase one morning. Through a serious of random events, inside were these photographs of what happened 66 years ago this summer.
The International Center of Photography (ICP) is currently exhibiting part of them until this Sunday, August 28th. Brave the potential hurricane if you want to catch a glimpse.
