Memory and survival in everyday textures – Ishiuchi Miyako’s Here and Now: Atomic Bomb Artifacts, ひろしま/ Hiroshima 1945/2007

Abstract

This article explores the contribution of ひろしま/ Hiroshima (2008) by photographer Ishiuchi Miyako as it relates to the historical, documentary, artistic, scientific, forensic, and instrumental role of photography in Japan during the prewar, war, and postwar eras. Part of a postwar generation of Japanese photographers that sought to reconcile photography as an artistic practice, the postwar landscape, and the memory of the war and the atomic bomb, Ishiuchi’s project uses clothing and personal items as sites through which to establish and expand the viewer’s connection to the lives and experiences of bombing victims, and thus the meaning of memorialization and national memory.

Keywords:

• atomic bomb
• photographs
• photography – social aspects
• war photography
• emotional trauma
• clothing and dress

Decisions by American and Japanese officials after the United States deployed the atomic bomb in August 1945 led to photography’s diminished role as an immediate source of information about and site of memorialization of the atrocities. The suppression of images through official censorship, and the confiscation and destruction of photographs, contributed to the fact that it was not until after the American occupation of Japan in 1952 that photographic records of the human, structural, and environmental toll of the use of the bombs began to circulate widely in Japanese media outlets (Marcoń 2011). It was not until the late 1960s that American officials gradually returned more images they had either produced or confiscated (Marcoń 2011). These conditions unusually altered photography’s capacity to serve as a collective means through which to, in Barbie Zelizer’s term, “bear witness”. Zelizer defines “bearing witness” as “an act of witnessing that enables people to take responsibility for what they see” (Zelizer 2002, 698). She writes that the photograph “facilitates the work by which individuals establish moral accountability, move on from the trauma, and in so doing help return the collective to its pre-traumatic state” (2002, 698). Hiro Saito argues the near absence of photographic records in national life informed Japan’s memory of the bombings. Drawing on Roland Barthes’s theories, Saito argues the delayed dissemination of images “produced among the viewers the consciousness that the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki belonged to the distant past (having-been-there-and-then), not the present (being-here-and-now)” (Saito 2006, 365). Further, Saito writes, the documentary photographs of the devastation positioned viewers “as spectators of the past, not actors of the present who shared the victim’s wound” (Saito 2006, 365).

The meaning of witness and the negotiation of the relationship of the present-day viewer to the bombing, and its victims and survivors, are central themes evoked in the seriesひろしま/ Hiroshima (2008) by photographer Ishiuchi Miyako. In light of the unique role of photography in the aftermath of the atomic bombings, this essay argues Ishiuchi’s Hiroshima reclaims the function of photography as a site through which to witness and to connect the past and the present. Her project differs from other postwar projects because she complicates the meaning of this exercise through an expansive interpretation of the duration and temporal reality of this traumatic event, and thus the lives and experiences of victims and survivors.

Born in 1947, Ishiuchi came of age within postwar generations of photographers for whom, as Anne Wilkes Tucker broadly observes, the war’s trauma and the Occupation (1945–1952) were driving influences (Tucker 2002). Such topics as the meaning of documentary and personal photographic expression were explored in numerous exhibitions and photographic books, and in magazines like Camera Mainichi, Camera, and Photo Art. Domon Ken articulated his ideas on the photographer as a social agent, and photographic realism, in an influential series of texts published in Camera and Photo Art (Tucker 2002). In his words, “photographic realism looks directly at reality, and points reality in a better direction” (Ken 2006, 25). He compiled his documentation of the postbomb structural damage and the lives of survivors (known as hibakusha) in the seminal Hiroshima (1958), a project that became emblematic of his belief in the power of photography to change society. In the series on military bases and towns, titled Occupation, that he began in 1959, Tomatsu Shomei’s depictions of the influence of America on postwar Japan register ambivalence towards the directly humanist appeals of the postbomb photography of his peers. Ishiuchi’s oeuvre, with its recurring interest in exploring change and the relationship between the past and the present through such subjects as the surfaces of the body, reflects how she absorbed these debates. Her aesthetic often references documentary, but a personal interpretation and perspective of the real world are also significant aspects of her practice. As she has explained, regarding the title ひろしま/ Hiroshima,

The title ひろしま of this series means Hiroshima written in Japanese Hiragana characters…. The Hiragana characters were extensively used by women in former times…. Using this way of Japanese writings for the title means to the artist that this series is made by the point of view and feelings of a woman. (Ishiuchi 2014)

The subjects of Ishiuchi’s Hiroshima series are personal artefacts collected by volunteers and family members of bombing victims, and donated to the archive of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. If the exact facts of the bombing and the extent of impact were largely hidden from Japanese civilians and only fully known to the political, military, and scientific elite, these items compellingly recover the position of the everyday citizen. Items from the archive have appeared in the work of other photographers. For example, Tsuchida Hiromi’s deadpan black-and-white records of these artefacts seemly suggest the past is unreachable. Ishiuchi’s project is distinguished by her vivid use of colour and manipulation of points of view.

Photography, science, forensics, and the atomic bomb

Ishiuchi’s subject matter and approach remind viewers that photography had already established a distinct relationship to the atomic bomb prior to 1945. Authors including Robert Jay Lifton and Kyo Maclear have argued the events of August 1945 pose a distinct challenge to creative responses in any medium (visual and literary); however, photography’s connection to this trajectory of events is especially complex. Photography contributed to the scientific and technological development of the bomb as a research tool. Acknowledging the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of and experiments on properties of radiation in the late 1800s, Akira Mizuta Lippit describes the history photography shares with radiation as “uncanny” (Lippit 1995). When Robert Oppenheimer and his team worked to create the atomic bomb, they used visual data collected by cameras and other equipment in order to document and measure such aspects as degrees of radioactivity and temperature.

Hiroshima portrays single items against a plain background under even lighting, referencing the aesthetic of scientific data and forensic photography. Clothing was the focus of forensic study following the bombing. When the United States Strategic Bombing Survey arrived in October 1945 to record and assess the impact of the bomb, survey workers studied and photographically documented how different fabrics responded to exposure to the blast and whether thick fabric offered any protection to the skin. Some fabric “‘smoked’, but did not burst into flame” (United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Vol. II 1947, 24). Darker colours responded differently from lighter colours: “white silk seldom was affected, although black, and some other colored silk, charred and disintegrated”.

Rather than enforcing distant reverence or suggesting the objective perspective of the scientist or investigator, Ishiuchi’s choice of medium and her technique activate these objects as material presences. There are no extensive texts describing the objects – individual images are untitled. The vivid colour announces a subjective investigation. The lighting conditions and the use of a background are unifying elements to the series, but Ishiuchi eschews a systematic placement of objects in the composition. The background is not always visible as some garments fill the entire frame. Some photographs portray items in their entirety. Other photographs focus on a fragment, such as a corner or the lapels of a jacket, and the viewer must imagine the rest. The objects migrate around the frame, forcing the viewer to shift their gaze. Her use of different images sizes and orientations means each work portrays a different relationship between object and the parameters of the picture frame, or between viewer and photograph. In installations, Ishiuchi arranges the works in various locations around the walls, with irregular spacing between the works.

Ishiuchi’s analytical proximity of the garments allows the viewer to explore the fine texture of mottled crepe, or other details such as someone’s handwriting on the inside. Lifton wrote: “Hiroshima not only exceeded all previous limits of destruction, but had, in effect, declared that there were no limits to destruction” (Lifton 1987, 261). Here, the intimacy of scale is the opposite of the enormity of the event itself. The scale encourages us to explore these personal landscapes with our eyes and with our fingers. She wrote of her selection process: “…I chose things that at one time had touched skin and bodies, and photographed them…” (Museum of Anthropology 2011). Ishiuchi’s link of fabric to skin recalls the photograph’s particular relationship to its referent. As Susan Sontag described it, the photograph is “something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask” (Sontag 1973, 154). In postwar Japanese photography, photographers turned to documenting aspects of the physical landscape as symbolic of the war’s national, social, and psychic traumas. Working in a controlled studio setting, Ishiuchi’s intensely close presentation transforms the fabric into landscapes of a different sort. There are areas of smoothness, and areas puckered with damage. These “scars” on the fabric serve as metaphors for the bodies of bomb victims and of a nation.

Finding Hiroshima in everyday textures

Ishiuchi’s project proposes that it is misleading to understand these objects as marked by only a singular moment in time. These objects are themselves material witnesses to the social, economic, and political history and reality of their unseen wearers, and the ways they chose to respond to that reality. Prohibitions issued on 7 July 1940 outlawed the manufacture and sale of goods that were considered “unneeded and nonurgent” or “luxurious” – including fabrics (Atkins 2005). The government sought to use clothing guidelines as a tool to boost civilian loyalty and to portray a unified country (Atkins 2005). The cotton shortage was such that it gained the designation of “precious good”; in the last year of the war, Japan produced very few textiles at all (Atkins 2005).

Some of the items reflect government wartime mandates and the scarcity of fabric, but others do not. Ishiuchi wrote:

I catch my breath at their vivid hues and textures, surfacing from the long shadows cast by their extreme circumstance… I found Hiroshima in the gentle, everyday textures surviving in the silhouette of a one-piece dress, worn, perhaps clandestinely, by an unknown woman, and in the deep folds of a gathered skirt, in a fabric woven of silken threads. (Ishiuchi 2014)

Choices in clothing and accessories convey personal perspectives and lived experiences. As an integral aspect of self-identity and self-representation, personal adornment serves a communicative function – conveying personal desires, feelings, and intentions of the wearer (Roach and Eichner 2007). These personal items remind viewers of life in during wartime, expanding the temporal qualities of the image. August was only the culmination of a war strategy that severely impacted civilian life (Jansen 2002). The owners of the items in the photographs endured these years too, and the objects also embody those periods. Ishiuchi’s photographs document the changing role of textiles in everyday life in Japan, and they suggest something of the lives and identities of the people who owned them, how these people represented themselves publicly and privately, and how their community saw them during a particular historical moment. Personal display and the contemplation of one’s own display and that of others foster feelings of pleasure (Maclear 1999). Trauma is not the only feeling registered in the objects. Ishiuchi’s photographic interpretations of the objects further expand these dimensions of display and self-representation. The viewer encounters the objects in the present; existing in “being-here-and-now”, the viewer extends and supplements the imaginary conversation with the original owner, and their desires and experiences.

Living memorials

In response to the discussions about the capacity of witnessing, testimony, fiction, and metaphor to communicate and memorialize the trauma of the events of 1945, Kyo Maclear asks: “What would it take to see the fictional and the factual, the metaphoric and the referential, as mutually imbricated, rather than mutually exclusive?” (Maclear 1999, 71). Ishiuchi’s Hiroshima exists in what Maclear describes as the space of “approximation”, or “a dialectical space between art as frank recollection and art as unfettered imagination” (Maclear 1999, 71). In Ishiuchi’s creative work to engage the objects as communicative material presences rather than mute or self-evident artefacts, the project represents the facts of wartime Japan, while at the same time allowing for the personal lives of the objects’ former owners. Thus, through fact and fiction, the visual and the tactile, Hiroshima perpetuates the meanings of these objects. The role of the viewer is transformed from distant observer to immediate witness and participant in this encounter, which elicits an imaginative dialogue with the unknown and the reckoning of known facts. In this way, an art of “approximation” might also be understood as works that make space for the past and the present to coexist – as living memorials.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my anonymous readers for their insightful comments on this essay and the Andrew Roth Gallery for their assistance.