Photographing Australian-occupied Hiroshima

Atomic-bombed Hiroshima, Maria Tumarkin observes in Traumascapes, has become ‘the lens through which other sites of destruction and death can be witnessed and remembered’.¹ Tumarkin is suggesting Hiroshima’s reverberating significance as a set of images against which other tragedies are measured in the public imagination; she is also cannily implying the importance of the camera as the primary contemporary tool to represent and communicate massive devastation. In 2015, the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that heralded the nuclear age, it is worth reconsidering the role of photography in documenting an unprecedented level of destruction for which existing language seemed inadequate, and a sight that reduced early visitors to stunned silence.² One visual record of Hiroshima that illustrates the power of photography (and its limitations) is that produced by the Australian men and women of ‘BCOF’, the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in postwar Japan—relentless sightseers and habitual photographers who rarely ventured anywhere without their cameras.³