THE PHOTOGRAPHER AND THE FLASH

...She knows what it was like on the Miyuki Bridge that day at a little past eleven in the morning...

...As he rose from the table to investigate, Matsushige was blown across the room, the walls collapsed, and the roof fell...

...They were burned reddish-black, but their eyes remained opened...

...Again he crossed the Miyuki Bridge and this time was able to proceed...

...They could be very useful...

...When he got home, he took two more photographs—views of his wife's damaged barber shop and a smashed fire station across the road...

...He got as far as a burning field in front of the newspaper building, less than a mile from the hypocenter, but his office was in flames, "and I did not have the courage to go on...

...Although many in the photographs no doubt died later, none of his pictures shows a corpse...

...They simply stare at what lies across the bridge: a tornado of flame and smoke rushing to the suburbs...

...Matsushige lined up one gripping image after another—a woman nursing a dead baby, a streetcar filled with charred passengers still hanging on to their straps—but he could only push the shutter seven times...

...Matsushige turned an apparent weakness—the inability to focus on a single human face—into two of the most unselfconsciously artful photographs ever taken...

...he could only feel the warmth of her hand...

...At a streetcar stop in Minami-cho, he came upon a policeman, his head bandaged, signing ration certificates for bread or crackers...

...When I think about the day I took these pictures, I can never think about making a profit off them," he explains...

...A little later, they caused a stir worldwide when they appeared in Life magazine...

...Matsushige still had seventeen shots in his camera, but that "was the last photo I took on August 6," he says...

...It was not yet five o'clock...

...In the photograph, a man bows in front of the policeman, awaiting his certificate...

...In the fire, the cameras belonging to the newspaper's other photographers were destroyed...

...As he trudged on, Matsushige would wipe his face with a towel until the rag was wet...

...In not a single shot that Matsushige took that day does anyone look at the camera...

...Why...

...Today, for the cause of disarmament, Matsushige lets peace groups reprint his photographs without charge...

...Only Matsushige knows what the seventeen photos he didn't take would have looked like...

...Hours later, they were sitting in an open field way out by the harbor when a woman friend of the family came up to her and handed her some bones, still hot, and said, "This is your mother...

...My injuries were not serious," he recalls, "and this scene was so atrocious...

...Today, a towering portrait of the Statue of Liberty, advertising a pa-chinko parlor below, dominates the scene surveyed in Matsushige's photographs...

...The atomic bomb has not yet finished with them or their city...

...The photos have also appeared in history books and textbooks...

...As Matsushige tells his tale, she often nods and sometimes adds, "So des nay"—It is so...

...As he passed through the incinerated city, on the way home again, Matsushige occasionally had to step on corpses to make his way...

...We are on that road to Hiroshima, three hours after the bomb fell, staring into the whirlwind...

...Matsushige decided he should make another effort to reach his office...

...Two of the young men are burned bald...

...August is the hottest time of the year," Matsushige points out...

...He may be asked this question often, but he doesn't have ready a glib answer for it...

...The second photograph is a close-up version of the first, focusing on the disheveled figures standing in the center...

...Yet the two photos taken on Miyuki Bridge capture the horror of the atomic bombing better than any of the pictures of twisted buildings and blackened faces that followed...

...The smoke was so dense he could not see her face...

...He stuck his head inside and saw twenty or more corpses, sitting and standing, holding on to the streetcar straps and leaning in the same direction, away from the blast...

...A woman carrying a dead, blackened baby was walking about, calling its name, and pleading, "Please wake up, please wake up...

...Behind the officer stands a woman with a rag wrapped around her face, looking on with the most profound expression of sadness...

...A naked baby was lying on this road...

...All of them have been scarred...

...You'd think I'd wish I'd taken more...

...Perhaps that is because the people in Matsushige's photos are feeling more than the effects of the blast—they are experiencing the bomb itself...

...Most people were burned...

...Five of the seven images came out, and they are all the world will ever know of what Hiroshima looked like on that day...

...When he was done, he returned to his home and developed the pictures in the most primitive way, since every darkroom in the city, including his own, had been destroyed...

...Under a star-filled sky, with the landscape around him littered with collapsed homes and the center of Hiroshima still smoldering in the distance, Matsushige washed his film in a radiated creek and hung it out to dry on the burned branch of a tree...

...Excitedly they talk about how they happened to arrive at the bridge at precisely the same moment on August 6. Kohchi says she was fleeing from Hiroshima with her father...

...And, since the Chugoku Shimbun was in shambles, his employer could not even use them...

...He holds up a small portfolio of his work and points to the left side of this first photo, where bomb victims sit in a ragged line, legs folded to their chests...

...Before she leaves, Matsushige asks her what she thinks of when she looks at these photographs...

...The photos are so affecting because, ever since that day, all of us have, in a sense, been standing on the road to the Miyuki Bridge, alive but anxious, and peering off into the distance at the smoke and firestorm approaching but not yet arrived...

...After a few minutes, the gray cloud cleared and, Matsushige recalls, "Maybe my professionalism awoke...

...Not aware of the dangers of radiation poisoning, they are already contemplating survival...

...by the time he placed it in his pocket it would already be dry...

...I have an awful feeling and I am horrified," she says somberly...

...He saw heaps of corpses, dozens trapped under fallen beams, and seven bodies resting at the bottom of a dried-up swimming pool, "broiled like fish," but he did not stop to photograph a single one...

...The Photographer and the Flash HIROSHIMA 1945 BY GREG MITCHELL Yoshito Matsushige wandered around Hiroshima for ten hours on August 6, 1945, carrying one of the few cameras that survived the atomic bombing and two rolls of film with twenty-four possible exposures...

...When the sky twinkled and a great white light flooded the room, he immediately thought of the magnesium flash used by photographers: It was as if God himself was photographing the earth...

...The Miyuki Bridge was torn down a few years ago...

...I thought they would be enraged if someone took a picture...

...Several other children whom he has just treated are standing nearby, holding their arms out, as if sleepwalking, apparently in great pain...

...And because the photographer has the same perspective as his victims, we see what they see...

...These are pictures that can never be taken again," she replies, "and must never be taken again...

...They seem utterly dazed, dumbfounded...

...With that, Matsushige picks up his belongings, bows deeply, and leaves the room, dapper in straw hat, blue suit, and bright white shoes, carrying in his arms a portfolio of photographs that are unique— and must never lose their uniqueness...

...A girl in a white blouse stands behind him, next in line...

...All was quiet...

...I want to thank you...

...Another infant clung to its mother's lifeless body...

...He touched the shutter but could not bring himself to push it...

...Matsushige felt that a new type of bomb had been used and he wondered how it would affect his film...

...A policeman in a dark suit, stationed at a relief station on the west end of the bridge, is wiping cooking oil on the hands of a girl on his left...

...Sometimes I think I should have gathered my courage and taken more photos, but at other times I feel I did all I could do...

...When the bomb went off on August 6, Yoshito Matsushige, a thirty-three-year-old photographer for the Hiroshima daily newspaper Chugoku Shimbun, was eating breakfast at his home two miles southeast of central Hiroshima...

...Mitsuko Kohchi caused a sensation in 1973 when she stepped forward and identified herself as the girl in the unforgettable photograph, but she has never had a chance to talk with Matsushige about that day until this day...

...it is hard to tell whether it is torn clothing or skin that hangs from them in tatters...

...He did not observe the mushroom cloud, for he was directly under it...

...This was no ordinary photo opportunity...

...she is the girl in the white blouse waiting to be treated with cooking oil...

...It was too heartbreaking...

...But they didn't ask for the negatives," Matsushige says, smiling like a cat...

...No photographic images of Nagasaki taken on August 9, 1945, have survived...

...The day was sunny and hot, the air-raid warnings of the previous night forgotten, and Matsushige was thinking that it hardly seemed his country was still at war...

...Matsushige retreated and framed a photograph...

...This article is his sixth in a series marking the atomic bombings and appearing in The Progressive each August...

...Two of his pictures were finally printed in the Chugoku Shimbun in July 1946, without permission from the occupation forces...

...Does he wish, then, that he had captured seventeen additional images on August 6—seventeen further arguments for the abolition of nuclear weapons...

...All of the figures in the photographs have their backs to the photographer and are staring at the approaching holocaust...

...When he returned to the bridge, he was surprised to find that it was suddenly filled with hundreds of people, most of them teen-agers...

...I'm often asked that," Matsushige says...

...Sitting next to Matsushige in the Chu-goku Shimbun conference room is a shy, thin woman in a turquoise dress...

...Near the Fukuya Department Store, he saw a streetcar blown off its tracks...

...I could not tell if this was hell," he says, "or whether I was still living in this world...

...No one cries out...

...He returned to his flattened home and from the debris dug out his hand-held Mi-miya viewfinder camera, two rolls of 6x6 black-and-white film, and his army uniform and headed for the Chugoku Shim-bun office...

...That night, when Matsushige developed his film under the stars, he had little confidence that any of the shots would come out, and no idea that if they didn't there would be no photographic record of that day...

...Matsushige received a card himself, and took a picture policeman scribbling quite intently on a slip of paper with a long black pen...

...Thinking his home had suffered a direct hit from a conventional bomb, Matsushige, with his wife, Sumie, who was four months pregnant, fled to a nearby field of sweet potatoes and hugged the Earth...

...It was just like something out of hell,* he says...

...When he lined up a second shot in the same spot, tears flowed and blurred the viewfinder...

...A few weeks later, the American occupation forces confiscated all post-bomb prints...

...Burn victims lining both sides of the road called out to him for water, but he hurried along...

...He raised the camera to his eye and brought this gruesome image into focus but again he could not "muster the courage" to press the shutter...

...He looks down at his thin hands and rubs his palms together quite hard...

...Now we see so many nuclear weapons still in the world," he finally replies...

...While Mitsuko Kohchi was fleeing from Miyuki Bridge with her father, Matsushige returned to what was left of his home...

...In Matsushige's photos, the menace seems to have a shattering life of its own, and it is advancing...

...I could not endure taking any more pictures that day...

...In contrast to the victims on the Miyuki Bridge that morning, the bomb is past tense for these people, or so they think...

...he asks...

...When he saw the images appearing, historical significance was not on his mind...

...I thought America had just done a terrible thing...

...The asphalt road was burning...

...But somehow I am glad that the pictures were taken...

...Crossing the Ota River at the Miyuki Bridge, Matsushige could see that a hellfire of flames ahead would prevent him from proceeding...

...Around two o'clock, professionalism called again...

...Greg Mitchell is executive director of the Center on Violence and Human Survival at the City University of New York...

...The terror evident in the way the victims are moving or sitting still (with their backs to the camera, we cannot read their expressions) in these grainy black-and-white photographs says more about the human response to the monstrous unknown than any Hollywood re-creation...

...Matsushige tried to take a picture...

...After twenty minutes, Matsushige gathered his courage and took the first picture taken in Hiroshima on August 6. Matsushige, now in his late seventies, a slight, frail man with thinning dark hair, sits quietly in his chair alongside a massive table in a conference room on the eighth floor of the new Chugoku Shimbun building, just across from Hiroshima's Peace Park...