60 ANOS APÓS HIROSHIMA

"Simnuke Project, a self-described “reaction to 60 years of the Atomic Age.

Simnuke ’s most substantial statements are made by those who have chronicled the physical and cultural effects of the atomic bomb.

Photographers Yusuke Yamahata and Carole Gallagher documented the aftermath of detonations in Japan and the United States, respectively. Taken while serving as a photographer in the Japanese army, Yamahata’s now-iconic images are stored in our national memory bank as memorials to the horror inflicted upon Nagasaki in 1945. Sixty years later, these photographs still provoke involuntary chills with their straight, photojournalistic capturing of human devastation. Scenes of destruction—of singed civilians, charred corpses, and ruined villages—demand respect for the past and careful consideration of still-present nuclear possibilities.

In 1983, Gallagher abandoned a successful New York photography career for Utah, where she spent the next seven years documenting the lives of radiation survivors, conducting extensive interviews with those whose lives were radically altered by the nuclear testing conducted by the US government from 1951-1963. Though the cancers, birth defects, and other serious health problems caused by radiation exposure did cause a veritable freak show of physical aberrations, Gallagher eschewed artistic exploitation for a focus on survivor’s own stories, providing a forum for those deemed as a “low-use segment of the population” by the Atomic Energy Commission when deciding where, exactly, to test their bombs. Published by MIT press in 1993, American Ground Zero is Gallagher’s finished documentary of this heinous slice of U.S. history".

Não percam este extraordinário documento.

Desde já fica o aviso, aos corações mais sensiveis, de que quer as imagens de Yusuke Yamamata quer os textos de Carole Gallagher serem duros, muito duros mesmo, mas fundamentais.