Poignant images captured in the aftermath of the Nagasaki bombing are to be sold at auction in New York this week.
The collection of 24 newly discovered photographs taken by Japanese military photographer Yosuke Yamahata depicts the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb at the end of the Second World War.
Yamahata was on an assignment near Nagasaki when the bomb dropped on 9 August 1945. Upon hearing the news he took a train to the city along with the writer Jun Higashi and the painter Eiji Yamada, arriving at 3am the following day.
Having been instructed to document the destruction for military propaganda purposes, he worked from dawn to dusk, taking around 119 photographs on two different cameras.
But, unbeknown to Yamahata at the time, one of his cameras had a faulty shutter device - the images to be auctioned are thought to include 12 taken from the original negatives of this defective camera.
The city is unrecognisable
Survivors wander through the desecrated landscape
A mother and her child appear in a state of shock
A woman breastfeeds her baby amid the rubble
Source :
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/nagasaki-one-day-after-the-atomic-bombing-seen-in-newlydiscovered-pictures-9472178.html
