The Atomic Photographers Guild (APG) is an international collective of artists dedicated to making visible all facets of the nuclear age. Created in 1987 by Robert Del Tredici, with founding members Carole Gallagher and Harris Fogel, the APG documents the history, impact and ongoing legacy of the atomic age – emphasizing nuclear weapons mass-production, atomic testing and proliferation, nuclear power, reactor accidents, radioactive waste containment, irradiated landscapes, and radiation affected populations.
The APG has established an archive of images from 1945 to the present. Prominent works include prints by the world’s first two atomic photographers, Berlyn Brixner of Los Alamos and Yoshito Matsushige of Hiroshima. Brixner was the official photographer of the Trinity Bomb in the Alamogordo desert on July 16, 1945; Matsushige was the only photographer to document the atomic bombing of Hiroshima from within the city on August 6, 1945. Carole Gallagher’s work documents the damage done to down-winders of southern Utah living under clouds of atomic fallout from the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s and early 60s. Robert Del Tredici has photographed the US H-bomb factory complex, uranium mining in the US and Canada, nuclear waste sites and atomic survivors in the US and former USSR. Additional members come from Japan, Germany, the USA, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Brazil, Russia, and the Czech Republic. The APG’s growing membership engages the socio-political, discursive, ethical and ecological dimensions of the nuclear era.
Through exhibitions, screenings, publications and lectures, members of the APG actively disseminate their work, piecing together the fragments of what could be our darkest, most enduring legacy.
Image : Yoshito Matsushige: one of five photographs taken in Hiroshima, Aug 6, 1945. People who escaped serious injury apply cooking oil to their burns near Miyuki Bridge.
In August 6, 1945, Yoshito Matsushige was 32 years old, living at home in Midori-cho, Hiroshima. His home was 1.7 miles away from ground zero, just outside of the 1.5 mile radius of the total destruction created by atomic blast effects. Miraculously, Matsushige was not seriously injured by the explosion. With one camera and two rolls of film with 24 possible exposures, he tried to photograph the immediate aftereffects of the bombing of Hiroshima.
Blocked by flames, Matsushige was unable to get to his newspaper office so he returned to Miyuki Bridge. In his account of the experience, he explains how he tried to take photographs of the terrible carnage he witnessed at the bridge but could not bring himself to press the shutter button. After struggling at that location for twenty minutes, he finally took his first photographs. During the next ten hours, Matsushige was only able to click the shutter seven times. He said, “It was such a cruel sight that I couldn’t bring myself to press the shutter.” In addition, he was afraid the burned and battered people would be enraged if someone took their pictures. Matsushige could not develop the film right away but eventually did so after twenty days, in the open, at night, using a radioactive stream to rinse the photographs. Only five of the seven photographs were developable. His photos would be the only immediate record of the destruction at Hiroshima.
A few weeks after the atomic bombing, the American military confiscated all of the post-bombing newspaper photographs and/or newsreel footage, but failed to confiscate many of the negatives. As a result, photographs from the Hiroshima atomic bombing were not published until the United States occupation of Japan ended in April 1952. The magazine Asahi Gurafu initially published Matsushige’s photographs in a special edition on August 6, 1952. This edition was titled “First Exposé of A-Bomb Damage.” This special edition sold out so quickly that four additional printings were run, replacing the original color cover with a black and white one. The total circulation of this special edition was approximately 700,000. The following month, Life Magazine published two of the five Matsushige’s photographs in the September 29, 1952 edition of the magazine in an article titled “When Atom Bomb Struck – Uncensored.”