Official photographs were taken of the first atomic bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945, but a failed projector prevented them being used to brief the airmen detailed to attack Japan. The bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August was recorded by Sergeant George R. Caron using a hand-held K-20 aerial camera in the tail of the B-29 bomber Enola Gay; photography from fixed cameras was thwarted by the manoeuvring of the aircraft. The Nagasaki attack on 9 August was also photographed, and pictures were released to the press on the 11th, the day Japan surrendered. On the 17th, Time published eight images of the Alamogordo test. On 19 November, Life published a full-page colour photograph of the event.
Photography of post-war American tests was at first strictly controlled. But from 1952, detonations in Nevada became more easily accessible to the press, and photographers and editors increasingly tended to aestheticize them, constructing an ‘atomic sublime’ (Peter Hales) that masked the weapons' destructiveness. Black humour also crept in: a 1951 Life photograph captured a delicate puff of atomic cloud floating towards the phantasmagoric Las Vegas skyline. In the meantime, Harold Edgerton's company, EG&G, was devising equipment that could capture the intense heat and light of an explosion from 7 miles' distance and at speeds of 1/100, 000, 000 s.
Images of atomic devastation were slower to reach the public. The Japanese press photographer Yoshito Matsushige managed to take five usable pictures of the damage in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 but, although the negatives escaped confiscation by the Americans, they were not published in Life until September 1952. (Yosuke Yamahata took similar pictures in Nagasaki.) In March 1953 Life showed the effect of an atomic blast on houses and their (dummy) inhabitants, revealed with surreal clarity by cine-frame enlargements; and, a year later, pictures of the crew of the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon, irradiated by fallout from the first H-bomb test on Elugelab Island. An outsize transparency of the fireball was chosen by Edward Steichen as the only colour image in the 1955 Family of Man exhibition. The year 1958, finally, saw the appearance of Ken Domon's chilling study of bomb survivors thirteen years on, Hiroshima.
US Defense Nuclear AgencyThe Fire Ball Rising: A-bomb test, Eniwetok Atoll, Marshall Islands, 1948
— Robin Lenman
Bibliography
- Leo, V., ‘The Mushroom Cloud Photograph: From Fact to Symbol’,
Afterimage , 13 (1985). - Fermi, R., et al., Picturing the Bomb: Photographs from the Secret World of the Manhattan Project (1995).
- Hales, P. B., ‘Imagining the Atomic Age: Life and the Atom’, in E. Doss (ed.), Looking at Life Magazine (2001).
- Light, M., 100 Suns. 1945-62 (2003)
