“Are We Allowed to Find Beauty in the Face of Death and Destruction: Ishiuchi Miyako’s Hiroshima and Postwar Japan”
Photographer Ishiuchi Miyako (b. 1947) began photographing cloths and artifacts left by Hiroshima’s nuclear bomb victims and survivors in 2007. Published as three separate volumes and exhibited at numerous venues both inside and outside Japan, her Hiroshima photos have powerfully represented the absent presence of bodies that used to wear and touch these objects garnering critical acclaim from art critiques. Their bright colors and high aesthetic quality separate her works from other preceding photographic—often monochromatic—representations of life after the nuclear attack in Hiroshima.