Hiroshima‒Nagasaki Remembered Through the Body: Haptic visuality and the skin of the photograph

Abstract

The continued growth in the interaction of photography with other media, together with a revived interest in analogue technologies in reaction against the growing digitisation of the image, have served to focus interest in the broader sensorial experience of the photograph. Film theory, using a range of ideas drawn from phenomenology and embodiment theory, provides a useful model through which to rethink our understanding of the way in which photographs are experienced at the level of the body. Working critically with a range of such ideas, this paper takes the example of photographs of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, together with subsequent photographic projects based on those events, in order to further contribute to this rethinking of the sensorial experience of the photograph.

Acknowledgements

I’m grateful to Kerstina Mortensen for the opportunity to first present these ideas in a paper at the AAH Annual Conference in April 2016. I would also like to thank the two anonymous peer reviewers for their supportive, thoughtful comments. I’m enormously indebted to the various copyright holders for their curtesy and generosity in agreeing to the reproduction of their works, including Kawada Kikuji, Takayuki Ogawa, Shōmei Tōmatsu — Interface, Yasuko Tōmatsu, Tomoko Araki, the Japan Professional Photographers Society, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the Ken Domon Museum of Photography, the Chugoku Shimbun and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. I would also like to thank Ishiuchi Miyako and Tomoka Aya. Finally, this article would not have been possible without the enormous assistance of Toshi Ono and the Japan Reproduction Rights Center – many thanks.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All Japanese names are given according to the Japanese convention of surname first.

2 This interrogation of the photograph would include works such as James Elkins (ed.), Photography Theory (2007); Elkins, What Photography Is (2011); Alex Klein (ed.), Words Without Pictures (2009); Carol Squiers (ed.), What is a Photograph? (2014).

3 We should acknowledge at once that Merleau-Ponty is making rather major conceptual claims here, based on rather thin bodily evidence.

4 Laura Marks draws upon intercultural cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, though here too “reality” is heavily filtered through an artistic sensibility.

5 For a full discussion of these issues see Paul Ham, Hiroshima and Nagasaki (2013) and Max Hastings, Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45 (2007).

6 The film made by the high-speed camera at Hiroshima was destroyed in processing, while at Nagasaki the observation plane arrived too late at the rendezvous point.

7 Later official Japanese estimates are 140,000 dead at Hiroshima and 70,000 at Nagasaki by the end of 1945 (Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 113).

8 See for example: Hiroshima‒Nagasaki. A Pictorial Record of the Atomic Destruction; A Call from Hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Physical, Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings.

9 The child in this image is not a direct victim of the explosion (Ken Domon Museum).

10 For a discussion of Tōmatsu’s involvement in contemporary art and of the influence of Yamahata’s Nagasaki photos on his work, see Nakamori Yasufumi in For a New World to Come (16 and 62). See also Doryun Chong, Tokyo 1955–70 (2012); Doryun Chong et al., From Postwar to Postmodern (2012).

11 Merleau-Ponty refers to a “style” of being.

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Neil Matheson

Neil Matheson is Senior Lecturer in Theory and Criticism of Photography at the University of Westminster and has published widely on photography, surrealism and contemporary art. He is editor of The Sources of Surrealism (2006) and joint editor of The Machine and the Ghost (2013). He has also published recent essays on Beaton and aerial warfare, on the work of Ithell Colquhoun, and on Magritte and anatomy. His book Surrealism and the Gothic was published by Routledge in July 2017.