George Yoshitake was an eyewitness to the dawn of the Atomic Age, said William J. Broad in The New York Times. Yoshitake was part of a top-secret group of filmmakers enlisted by the U.S. Army in 1947 to record the military’s myriad nuclear tests during the Cold War. “To see the power of these bombs is unbelievable,” says Yoshitake. The memory of his first hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific is one he’s never been able to shake. “The purple glow in the sky—that was so eerie,” Yoshitake recalls. “And we were not even close, about 20 miles away. It filled the whole sky. It’s frightening, believe me.” He would be even closer, “about five or six miles away,” for later tests in Nevada, and recalls what the fiery blasts did to pigs corralled in the desert. “You could smell the meat burning. If they were humans they would have suffered terribly.”

https://theweek.com/articles/490825/george-yoshitake-cameraman-who-filmed-apocalypse

Born in Los Angeles in 1929, Yoshitake was the third-eldest of five children of Japanese immigrants. As a 5-year-old, he was a piano prodigy who was able to correctly name a key upon hearing it played from another room.

In 1942, Yoshitake, along with his parents and siblings, were among thousands of Japanese Americans sent to the Rohwer internment camp in Arkansas. Despite being surrounded by barbed wire and having few personal possessions, he managed to find simple pleasures in camp like snacking on baked yams and playing with friends. After the war, he returned to Los Angeles as a young teen.

He briefly served in the U.S. Air Force and later as a civilian photographer for the U.S. government, and shot the iconic “Ground Zero” photographs of five Army officers who stood underneath an atomic nuclear blast in the Nevada desert on July 19, 1957. He was not aware of what his assignment would entail until arriving at the test center that day.

The Atomic Filmmaker