HiroshimaThe Peace Memorial Museum is the perfect-sized...

Hiroshima

The Peace Memorial Museum is the perfect-sized building, that is, not too large. It’s a Shinto temple filtered through Corbusier. When I visited earlier this year, part of the museum was under renovation, the exhibit took about an hour.

The exhibit opens with two small antechambers of photographs. The first is a grid of photographs of the mushroom cloud from various angles. There’s a New Topographics feel to this grid. These photos show different perspectives on the cloud, but none of the photographers were far enough way to capture the shape we all recognize. The grid turns the views into a cubist rendering and I was left with the curiosity the photographers must have experienced: What just happened? What am I looking at?

The second space has one large square photograph by Yoshito Matsushige. This is one of the remarkable stories of 20th century photography that I wasn’t aware of before visiting. There are five known frames taken inside Hiroshima that day, taken by Matsushige with a 6x6 camera. He developed them in a river. In an interview, Matsushige said he would have taken more photographs of people, but he felt they were so ravaged that they might attack him. Despite his own exposure, he lived until 2005 (aged 92).

I stood in front of this photograph for several minutes. Unlike the grid of mushroom clouds, you are no longer at a safe distance. The enlargement shows damage to the negative. Everyone has their back turned to the camera and, based on Matsushige’s story, that makes sense. It’s a powerful photograph because it doesn’t feel composed. It doesn’t feel like he was chasing the most shocking scene he saw that day. You feel his caution. It feels like a random moment. The chaos of the composition builds on the mushroom cloud grid, it’s very ominous, you know that you have not seen the worst.

The rest of the exhibit is a mix of artifacts, information graphics and smaller photographs. There are many photographs of victims suffering with burns. Around the perimeter of several galleries are outfits of damaged clothing. These are stories of children in school uniforms that made it home, dying of burns and radiation. Hiroshima is a large story to tell, with global implications that are relevant to this moment, but at times it feels like a museum about burning children alive.  

The exhibit lighting is very dim, I’m guessing to protect the artifacts and maintain atmosphere. I haven’t been to the concentration camps, but I imagine it’s like this: You find yourself quietly weeping with people from all around the world.

As a child, first grasping to understand the effects of a nuclear bomb, the thing that fascinated me was that you can be incinerated in an instant. “Vaporized” is not the most accurate word, but it’s a word often used. A human life turned to dust, something out of science fiction. The fire bombing of Tokyo also killed a staggering number of people, but what makes nuclear war different is speed and intensity. A city and it’s population turned to dust, not over days, but in seconds. There’s a corner of concrete from a bank where supposedly you can see the shadow of a person incinerated. It’s a very faint fixed shadow, perhaps not the most accurate word, but a photographic representation of a human life vanished.

They also have figures, people with sheets of skin peeling off, with a painted scene of the city burning in the background. The models and the concrete shadow feel like exhibits from a previous era and hopefully will be updated. It’s difficult to imagine what would be a ‘successful’ exhibit at Hiroshima. The challenge is to not allow the museum to feel entirely historical, to calmly present the threat we live with, with the evidence of that day.

Hiroshima altered my perspective. There are other large, civilization-threatening problems that we read and think about more frequently, because they are all easier to consider than nuclear war. We rationally know how small probabilities work over time. The stakes are always Hiroshima. And it’s insane that each generation has passed this shrieking, awful horror down to the next.

Related:

• Yoshito Matsushige at the Atomic Photographers Guild 
• John Hersey’s book-length history of the atomic bombing, published a year after the bombing
• Shōmei Tōmatsu’s photographs Hiroshima-Nagasaki Document 1961 
• Michael Lewis writing about the Department of Energy