Rediscovered Photographs of Hiroshima

[Tuckerfan]

@bonzer

I suppose it falls to me to pedantically point out that, while the story of them being found in a discarded box in the street is striking and the finder’s reaction to them interesting, the pictures themselves were not hitherto unknown. Only this particular collection of prints was ever “lost”.

Indeed, the second picture - it’s the Hiroshima Gas Company building - has always been one of the most widely reproduced images of building damage in the city. Versions of five out of the ten pictures in the article even appear together (not brilliantly reproduced, it must be said) in Rain of Ruin (Brassy’s, 1995) by Goldstein, Dillon and Wenger.
All the original official photographic material generated in Japan by both the Manhattan Project’s Atomic Bomb Investigating Group and the Strategic Bombing Survey has been preserved by the U.S. National Archives. Not least because their documentation of the damage was important to the Cold War efforts to reliably predict what the effect of some particular dollop of megatonnage would be. But also because they were always recognised as historically important.

Of course, additional copies are worth taking care of, particularly if they prompt people to reflect on the images.

While I don’t doubt you, I feel the need to point out that the government has an amazing ability to lose things. I’ve been looking for a report from a particular government program for a number of years, and I even have the various catalog data about the report which the government put on the web several years ago. However, in contacting the various branches of government who should have copies of the thing, none of them have been able to find it. The last one response I got on the report, the researcher said that barring a miracle, they’d never be able to find it.

[bonzer]

Of course.

But being well-known - at least to those with the specialist interest - recognised as important, declassified, catalogued and accessible in the National Archives are already pretty much the best possible circumstances when worrying about safeguarding such material for posterity.