Yōsuke Yamahata

was a Japanese photographer best known for extensively photographing Nagasaki the day after it was bombed.

Biography

Yamahata was born in Singapore on 6 August 1917; his father, Shōgyoku Yamahata (Template:Category handler, later to become known as a photographer) had a job there related to photography. He went to Tokyo in 1925 and eventually started at Hosei University (Tokyo) but dropped out in 1936 to work in G. T. Sun (Template:Category handler, Jīchīsan Shōkai, aka Graphic Times Sun), a photographic company run by his father. (He would become its president in 1947.) 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".

Gallery

• A boy holding a rice ball, which is one of Yamahata's famous photos
  A boy holding a rice ball, which is one of Yamahata's famous photos
• A mother and her child leaving the first-aid station after receiving rations
  A mother and her child leaving the first-aid station after receiving rations
• A mother and a child waiting for the turn of treatment in front of Michino'o station, Nagasaki City
  A mother and a child waiting for the turn of treatment in front of Michino'o station, Nagasaki City
• Victims of atomic bombing
  Victims of atomic bombing
• A charred body and a woman stunned with shock
  A charred body and a woman stunned with shock
• Survivors of the atomic bombing
  Survivors of the atomic bombing
• Victims of the atomic bombing
  Victims of the atomic bombing
• Partially incinerated child in Nagasaki
  Partially incinerated child in Nagasaki

Books of Yamahata's works

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

See also

• Yoshito Matsushige – Hiroshima photographer

Sources

• Template:In lang Hirakata (Template:Category handler). "Yamahata Yōsuke". Nihon shashinka jiten (Template:Category handler) / 328 Outstanding Japanese Photographers. Kyoto: Tankōsha, 2000. Template:ISBN. Despite the English-language alternative title, all in Japanese.
• Kaku: Hangenki (Template:Category handler) / The Half Life of Awareness: Photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 1995. Exhibition catalogue; captions and text in both Japanese and English. Fifteen pages of Yamahata's photographs of Nagasaki; also works by Ken Domon, Toshio Fukada, Kikujirō Fukushima, Shigeo Hayashi, Kenji Ishiguro, Shunkichi Kikuchi, Mitsugi Kishida, Eiichi Matsumoto, Yoshito Matsushige, Shōmei Tōmatsu, and Hiromi Tsuchida. Text and captions in both Japanese and English.
• Template:In lang Nihon no shashinka (Template:Category handler) / Biographic Dictionary of Japanese Photography. Tokyo: Nichigai Associates, 2005. Template:ISBN. Despite the English-language alternative title, all in Japanese.

External links

• Photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• Nagasaki Journey, The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata, presented by the San Francisco Exploratorium