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16 Nov 2008 11:49 am
A Hole In Our Collective Memory
Adam Harrison Levy tells the story of recently discovered photographs from Hiroshima, found in a pile of trash 8 years ago:
On September 18, 1945, just over a month after Japan had surrendered, the U.S. Government imposed a strict code of censorship on the newly defeated nation. It read, in part: “nothing shall be printed which might, directly or by inference, disturb public tranquility.”
...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.”
These images go some way towards filling in this hole in our historical
memory. Taken during the weeks following the bombing, they show a
landscape that is eerily vacant and quiet, like ruins from a vanished
civilization. But why were they taken and by whom? And how is it that
they ended up in a pile of garbage?
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