Flash of Light, Wall of Fire

Patients being treated in a medical tent in Hiroshima on Aug. 9.Credit...Yotsugi Kawahara, courtesy Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

“Americans, when they think about atomic war, think about the mushroom cloud,” said Benjamin Wright, a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin who helped curate “Flash of Light, Wall of Fire,” a new book of photographs about the 1945 bombings.
“Perhaps they think of a destroyed city, but it’s very much a bird’s-eye view,” Mr. Wright said by telephone.

The book, published this month by the University of Texas Press to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the bombings, attempts to change that. It includes images from more than a dozen Japanese photographers, starting with Mr. Matsumoto’s photo of a Hiroshima wall clock that stopped at the moment when a nuclear bomb detonated above the city in a flash of light.

From the NY Times article "After Atomic Bombings, These Photographers Worked Under Mushroom Clouds" (Aug. 6, 2020)

A young woman who survived the explosion at Minami-Ohashi, a mile south of ground zero, being pulled on Oct. 4 by her aunt on a cart over rubble-covered roads to Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital. Credit...Shunkichi Kikuchi, courtesy Harumi Tago

A police station on Sept. 15 in Shimoyanagi-cho, Hiroshima. The clock stopped at the time of the bomb blast.Credit...Eiichi Matsumoto