Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945

by John W. Dower

On 6 August 1945, the US government dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. This was the first wartime use of a nuclear weapon, and along with the bombing of Nagasaki three days later, heralded the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II. After the dust had settled, President Truman dispatched military personnel and civilians to photograph the destruction. Nearly seventy years later, Ground Zero 1945 presents a selection of these once confidential images alongside critical texts. 1,100 photographs were taken, and 865 of them published in the classified report The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan (1947). Today, 700 of these images are part of the permanent collection at the International Center of Photography. Ground Zero 1945 is testament to this shameful, haunting episode of the twentieth century and the role of documentary photography within it, and is the latest phase in ICP's ongoing investigation of the unacknowledged histories of photography.

Genres: Photography

247 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2011

About the author

John W. Dower is the author of Embracing Defeat, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; War without Mercy, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Cultures of War. He is professor emeritus of history at MIT. In addition to authoring many books and articles about Japan and the United States in war and peace, he is a founder and codirector of the online “Visualizing Cultures” project established at MIT in 2002 and dedicated to the presentation of image-driven scholarship on East Asia in the modern world. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.