Yōsuke Yamahata

Yamahata was born in Singapore on 6 August 1917; his father, Shōgyoku Yamahata (, later to become known as a photographer) had a job there related to photography. He went to Tokyo in 1925 and eventually started at Hosei University (Tokyo) but dropped out in 1936 to work in G. T. Sun (, Jīchīsan Shōkai, aka Graphic Times Sun), a photographic company run by his father. (He would become its president in 1947.) From 1940, Yamahata worked as a military photographer in China, Taiwan, French Indochina and Singapore and elsewhere in Asia outside Japan; he returned to Japan in 1942. == Photography of immediate after-effects the Nagasaki atomic bombing ==

In July 1945 Yamahata was requisitioned for a military journalist and dispatched to a department in Hakata on 1 August. He took up his new post of the department on 6 August, the day of Hiroshima bombing. On 9 August, 1945 it was reported in Japan that US bombers dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki and after it 5 military journalists in the department including Yamahata were commanded to go to Nagasaki to photograph its devastating scenes. On a day after the Nagasaki bombing, Yamahata reached the outskirt of Nagasaki to begin to photograph the devastation. Over a period of about twelve hours he took around a hundred exposures; by late afternoon, he had taken his final photographs near a first aid station north of the city. In a single day, he had completed the only extensive photographic record of the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing of either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. == Publication ==

Yamahata's photographs appeared swiftly in Japan, for example in the August 21 issue of Mainichi Shinbun. One which was used in Life, also appeared in the 1955 exhibition and book "The Family of Man" an exhibition created for The Museum of Modern Art by Edward Steichen, which was seen by 9 million visitors worldwide. One of the less graphic, but more affecting images, it depicted a bewildered little boy, clutching a rice ball, with shrapnel cuts to the face. The head-and-torso enlargement was cropped tightly from a negative that had also showed his mother, also with facial wounds, standing behind, against a background of railway tracks. == Illness and death ==

Yamahata became violently ill in 1965, on his forty-eighth birthday and the twentieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. He was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the duodenum. He died of the cancer on 18 April 1966 and was buried at Tama Cemetery, Tokyo. == Preservation and ongoing circulation of Yamahata's Nagasaki images ==

Restoration work was done on Yamahata's negatives after his death. An exhibition of prints, "Nagasaki Journey", traveled to San Francisco, New York, and Nagasaki in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the bombing. Yamahata's photographs of Nagasaki remain the most complete record of the atomic bombing as seen immediately after the bombing. The New York Times has called his photographs "some of the most powerful images ever made". == Gallery ==

File:A boy holding a rice ball.jpg|A boy holding a rice ball, which is one of Yamahata's famous photos File:A mother and her child leaving the first-aid station after receiving rations - 1945-08-10 morning.jpg|A mother and her child leaving the first-aid station after receiving rations File:A mother and a child waiting for the turn of treatment - In front of Michino'o station, Nagasaki City - 10 August 1945 - Yamahaya Yōsuke.png|A mother and a child waiting for the turn of treatment in front of Michino'o station, Nagasaki City File:Victims of the atomic bombing to Nagasaki.jpg|Victims of atomic bombing File:A charred body and a woman stunned with shock.png|A charred body and a woman stunned with shock Image:NagasakiSurvivors1945.jpg|Survivors of the atomic bombing Image:UrakamiStationAug1945.jpg|Victims of the atomic bombing Image:Nagasaki - person burned.jpg|Partially incinerated child in Nagasaki ==Books of Yamahata's works==

• Kiroku-shashin: Genbaku no Nagasaki (). Daiichi Shuppansha, 1952. • Genbaku no Nagasaki (). Tokyo: Gakufū Shoin, 1959. • Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata August 10, 1945. San Francisco: Pomegranate, 1995. . • Nagasaki yomigaeru genbaku shashin (). Tokyo: NHK, 1995. . • Yamahata Yōsuke (). Nihon no shashinka 23. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1998. . ==See also==