HIROSHIMA (Japan 1945)

After the Americans dropped their atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, the Japanese Ministry of Education assembled a special team to prepare a survey of the damage. The Nippon Eiga-sha film company was called in to shoot documentary footage. They took along the seasoned photographer Shunkichi Kikuchi to produce stills for them. His primary task was to record the victims, in order to gather medical information for doctors. More than sixty years later Kikuchi’s photographs are still a penetrating document regarding the horrors of the atomic bomb.