The Bombing of Hiroshima, Part 1
Photographing the incomprehensible, from the sky.
At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 19451, an atomic bomb ignited above Hiroshima, instantly killing over 70,000 people.
When President Truman heard the news, he turned to a group of soldiers and said, “This is the greatest thing in history. It’s time for us to get home.2”
The official cameraman for the mission was American physicist Bernard Waldman, on board the Necessary Evil, a B-29 sent to photograph the explosion. But Waldman came up empty. There’s a couple of theories about what happened. The Los Angeles Times falsely claimed that Waldman, “in his excitement,” forgot to open the Fastex camera’s shutter. Another theory suggested an electromagnetic pulse from the bomb caused the camera to malfunction. But in reality, it was a Capa-esque processing malfunction.
“Waldman believed he obtained good Fastax records from a point some 19 miles out,” John Malik wrote in 1985. “Because the film developing malfunctioned, the Fastax~ fi…