Will Robb Photography

On August 9th 1945, at 11.02am, the B-29 Superfortress bomber “Bockscar” dropped a plutonium nuclear bomb nicknamed “Fat Man” over Nagasaki. The bomb exploded around 500m above the Urakami area of the city, producing a 21 kiloton blast (almost double the force of the bomb dropped over Hiroshima 3 days earlier) which generated heat of 3900 degrees celcius, winds of more than 1000 kmph and it destroyed everything on a 1-2km radius and resulted in the immediate deaths of an estimated 75′000 people, including 13′000 Koreans who had been conscripted to work in factories in Nagasaki and allied POWs from Holland and the UK.

Two weeks ago Sue and I traveled to Nagasaki as our friend Paule Saviano from New York was having an exhibition in the Nagasaki Peace Museum entitled “From Above.” This exhibition is about the people who survived the war, it features survivors from Nagasaki and also the Tokyo fire bombings and he has recently added to it by photographing survivors from Hiroshima and Dresden. The exhibition continues to grow and next year he will be showing in Dresden, Chemitz, Tokyo and Nagasaki. Photographing the survivors is a massive project for Paule, he has been writing to people to try to get access to survivors, he’s been flying round the world, organizing shows with the help of Izumi, the curator of the gallery ef in Tokyo where Paule has shown several shows of the years. It’s an absolutely amazing project, he first sits and listens to the stories each survivor has to tell, sometimes for several hours, then he takes their portraits. As you can imagine, the survivors are all now very old, they won’t be around much longer and Paule’s project is all about remembering peoples stories of the day. Many of the survivors had kept the events history to themselves, some of them hadn’t even told their families what had happened, but Paule’s efforts are making sure that the memories of these people live on and I have nothing but the utmost admiration for all his efforts and what he is doing.

Unlike Hiroshima with its “genbaku domu” (bomb dome), Nagasaki doesn’t really have relic from the day the bomb was dropped to act as a symbol of the day. There are many statues around town near the epicenter, a column stands erect where the epicenter was and circles of bricks fan out from it to depict the bomb blast fanning out, but it takes on a somewhat off atmosphere when you stand back a bit and see a love hotel called Seagull in the background. Next to the epicenter is the column of original Urakami Cathedral which was mostly destroyed by the blast, but it had been moved several hundred meters from it’s original site and lacked impact for me. Apparently the remains of the Urakami Cathedral were a stark symbol of the bomb, but seeing as how it was a Cathedral (the largest in Asia actually), a symbol of Christianity and western ideals, there was pressure on the Japanese from the American government to pull down the remains as they didn’t want the symbol of the Nagasaki bomb to be a reminder that the bomb killed Christians. Nearby the epicenter in the Nagasaki peace park is perhaps the biggest statue to remember the bomb, again a symbol of peace, but it’s a colossus with a distinctly Asian face and the body of a Greek God. It’s supposed to represent humanity, one hand pointing to the sky to symbolise the bomb, one hand held flat to indicate peace.

All the statues in Nagasaki symbolize peace, you get the feeling there that everyone is trying to move forward positively through promoting peace. The only physical lasting remnants are in the atomic bomb museum, you walk through it seeing the twisted metal, melted glass, the clocks that stopped at 11.02 and even human shadows burned onto walls. It has a big impact, it’s a fairly small museum, but when you take your time to read the info at the exhibits you can easily spend a few hours there. The personal memories of the events of the atomic bomb are being lost every year, I’m not sure how many survivors remain, perhaps only a few hundred and that’s what makes Paule’s show so important. His show at the Nagasaki Peace museum was great, it didn’t sensationalize anything, it just told peoples stories.

Whilst in Nagasaki Paule was really busy, not just with the setting up of the show, but also photographing more survivors and dealing with an insane amount of media attention. I think on the day we arrived he had something like 9 TV interviews, 7 newspaper interviews and a radio interview. One day when he was meeting a survivor, Fukuhare san, he was kind enough to invite Sue and along to meet him. We sat in a room in the Atomic bomb survivors museum and listened to Fukuhare san tell the story of the day, how he lost a lot of his family, how he spent 36 hours covering the city trying to find family members and how himself photographed a lot of the aftermath to make him feel like he was doing something to make sure the events were never forgotten. Fukuhare san was very upbeat about the whole situation, he described hell whilst smiling and joking which made it a bit odd to listen to in some ways. I know many of the survivors Paule has talked to before become (understandably) very emotional when telling their stories, so I guess we had an easy one to listen to in some ways.

Paule listens to the stories and takes a picture, it’s such a simple thing but such an important thing. He’s doing it mostly all out of his own pocket, he puts an immense amount of time into arrnaging to meet these people and then he keeps in touch with them afterwards. He tries to keep out of the limelight as much as he can, I know all the media attention got to him a bit although a few of the reporters (notably the Asahi shibum team) were very nice. It’s just about telling the stories for Paule, it’s an amazing project and I really suggest you go check out all the details about this project and all the other amazing wok he does at his blog.