ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the contribution of ひろしま/Hiroshima (2008) by photographer Ishiuchi Miyako as it relates to the historical, documentary, artistic, scientific, forensic, and instrumental role of photography in Japan during the prewar, war, and postwar eras. Part of a postwar generation of Japanese photographers that sought to reconcile photography as an artistic practice, the postwar landscape, and the memory of the war and the atomic bomb, Ishiuchi’s project uses clothing and personal items as sites through which to establish and expand the viewer’s connection to the lives and experiences of bombing victims, and thus the meaning of memorialization and national memory.
