Author Description

The Ash Garden: Hiroshima "Under a Rain of Ruin," engages with the broadly accepted logic that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives by ending the war. My work interrogates this narrative through an examination of photographs, monuments, and sites encountered in Hiroshima in spring 2013. The Ash Garden opens with excerpts from declassified US military documents, followed by my photographs arranged in three chapters (A Noiseless Flash, Details Are Being Investigated, and Aftermath) whose titles reference John Hershey's 1946 Hiroshima essay. Each chapter begins at the hypocenter and represents the same 27 sites in Hiroshima, ordered according to their relative distance from ground zero. Referencing different historical moments, my project echoes the impulse to survey the A-bombed city in 1945, undertaken first by Japanese photographers and then by the US military. Beginning in the occupation period, Hiroshima rebuilt and established itself as a "City of Peace." In the decades since, Japanese survivor, civic, and corporate organizations have worked with government and city administrators to memorialize local histories. Placing the images shot in 1945 on monuments throughout the city, common formats were established for memorializing communities, events, and sites. My recent visitation of Hiroshima marks yet another shift in time and distance to the traumatic histories articulated in the memorials. Despite the impossibility of representing the atomic horrors, my work reveals evidence of the massive loss of civilian lives in the bombings. Foregrounding both the documentation of the disaster and the sites in present time, The Ash Garden aims to address the invisibility of atomic bomb histories in the North American context. It also acts as a counter narrative to the Enola Gay, prominently displayed in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.