A VIEW OF MOUNTAINS

Jonathan Schell

 

1.         On August 9, 1945, the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Yosuke Yamahata, a photographer serving in the Japanese army, was dispatched to the destroyed city. The hundred or so pictures he took the next day constitute the fullest photographic record of nuclear destruction in existence. Hiroshima, destroyed three days earlier, had largely escaped the camera’s lens in the first day after the bombing. It was therefore left to Yamahata to record, methodically －and, as it happens, with a great and simple artistry – the effects on a human population of a nuclear weapon only hours after it had been used. Some of Yamahata’s pictures show corpses charred in the peculiar way in which a nuclear fireball chars its victims. They have been burned by light – technically speaking, by the “thermal pulse” － and their bodies are often branded with the patterns of their clothes, whose colors absorb light in different degrees. One photograph shows a horse twisted under the cart it had been pulling. Another shows a heap of something that once had been a human being hanging over a ledge into a ditch. A third shows a girl who has somehow survived unwounded standing in the open mouth of a bomb shelter and smiling an unearthly smile, shocking us with the sight of ordinary life, which otherwise seems to have been left behind for good in the scenes we are witnessing. Stretching into the distance on all sides are fields of rubble dotted with fires, and, in the background, a view of mountains. We can see the mountains because the city is gone. That absence, even more than wreckage, contains the heart of the matter. The true measure of the event lies not in what remains but in all that has disappeared.