Ken Domon's Hiroshima was created over multiple visits to Hiroshima in 1957 and captures the enduring scars—both physical and emotional—borne by survivors thirteen years after the atomic bombing. As a leading figure in Japanese realism and social documentary photography, Domon approached this project with his signature "absolutely unstaged snapshot" method, aiming to present an unembellished, direct record of the city's human toll. The project emerged in a time when discussions of Hiroshima were still shadowed by postwar censorship, and Japan was rapidly modernizing, often at the cost of forgetting its painful past. Domon sought to counteract this trend, reminding his compatriots of the victims' suffering and the importance of remembrance.
Through stark black-and-white images, Domon juxtaposes viscerally raw documentary shots of keloid scars and surgeries with moments of human perseverance, such as children playing or a father laughing despite his disfigurement. The composition varies between intimate close-ups of wounds and medical procedures and broader perspectives capturing daily life in Hiroshima's Atomic Bomb Hospital. His emphasis on available light and an unfiltered aesthetic enhances the somber tone, reinforcing the project's emotional and historical gravity.
Published in 1958, Hiroshima immediately earned the Mainichi Photography Award and the Japan Photo Critics Association’s Photographer of the Year, followed by the Minister of Education’s Award of Arts (1959) and the Japan Journalists’ Congress Award (1960). Since then it has been shown widely—from the Ken Domon Museum of Photography and Twelve Photographers in Japan, 1945–55 (Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum of Art) to Domon’s first overseas survey at the Museo dell’Ara Pacis, Rome (2016) and Ken Domon at the Maison de la Culture du Japon, Paris (2023)—and has figured in nuclear-memory contexts such as Hiroshima–Nagasaki Document 1961 and The Half Life of Awareness: Photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 1995).
