Twelfth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

This paper discusses a select number of photographs taken by a Japanese military photographer the day after the atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan on August 9, 1945. The paper discusses the socio-political context of the photography, the history of the photographs over the past 60 years, and provides an in-depth critical analysis of the selected photographs. The paper seeks to explore the universal aspects of these specific images and how an initial Japanese audience and later an international audience might have responded to the iconic nature of the images. The paper ends with a discussion of the impact that seeing the photographs had on the author.