Yōsuke Yamahata


Yōsuke Yamahata was a Japanese photographer best known for extensively photographing Nagasaki the day after Atomic [bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki|it was bombed].

Biography

Yamahata was born in Singapore on 6 August 1917; his father, Shōgyoku Yamahata had a job there related to photography. He went to Tokyo in 1925 and eventually started at Hosei University but dropped out in 1936 to work in G. T. Sun, a photographic company run by his father. From 1940, Yamahata worked as a military photographer in China, Taiwan, French Indochina and Singapore and elsewhere in Asia outside Japan; he returned to Japan in 1942.

Photography of immediate after-effects the Nagasaki atomic bombing

In July 1945 Yamahata was requisitioned for a military journalist and dispatched to a department in Hakata on 1 August. He took up his new post of the department on 6 August, the day of Hiroshima bombing. On 9 August, 1945 it was reported in Japan that US bombers dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki and after it 5 military journalists in the department including Yamahata were commanded to go to Nagasaki to photograph its devastating scenes. On a day after the Nagasaki bombing, Yamahata reached the outskirt of Nagasaki to begin to photograph the devastation. Over a period of about twelve hours he took around a hundred exposures; by late afternoon, he had taken his final photographs near a first aid station north of the city. In a single day, he had completed the only extensive photographic record of the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing of either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Publication

Yamahata's photographs appeared swiftly in Japan, for example in the August 21 issue of Mainichi Shinbun. After the GHQ's restrictions on coverage of the effects of the atomic bomb were lifted earlier in 1952, his photographs of Nagasaki appeared in the September 29 issue of Life. The same year, they appeared in the book Kiroku-shashin: Genbaku no Nagasaki. One which was used in Life, also appeared in the 1955 exhibition and book "The Family of Man" an exhibition created for The Museum of Modern Art by Edward Steichen, which was seen by 9 million visitors worldwide. One of the less graphic, but more affecting images, it depicted a bewildered little boy, clutching a rice ball, with shrapnel cuts to the face. The head-and-torso enlargement was cropped tightly from a negative that had also showed his mother, also with facial wounds, standing behind, against a background of railway tracks.

Illness and death

Yamahata became violently ill in 1965, on his forty-eighth birthday and the twentieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. He was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the duodenum. He died of the cancer on 18 April 1966 and was buried at Tama Cemetery, Tokyo.

Preservation and ongoing circulation of Yamahata's Nagasaki images

Restoration work was done on Yamahata's negatives after his death. An exhibition of prints, "Nagasaki Journey", traveled to San Francisco, New York, and Nagasaki in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the bombing.
Yamahata's photographs of Nagasaki remain the most complete record of the atomic bombing as seen immediately after the bombing. The New York Times has called his photographs "some of the most powerful images ever made".

Books of Yamahata's works

  • Kiroku-shashin: Genbaku no Nagasaki. Daiichi Shuppansha, 1952.
  • Genbaku no Nagasaki. Tokyo: Gakufū Shoin, 1959.
  • Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata August 10, 1945. San Francisco: Pomegranate, 1995..
  • Nagasaki yomigaeru genbaku shashin. Tokyo: NHK, 1995..
  • Yamahata Yōsuke. Nihon no shashinka 23. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1998..