ART REVIEW : Mixed Messages in Photo Show on Hiroshima

The great horror of Germany’s calculated extermination of 6 million Jews in World War II continues to be recalled through photographs, plays, books and films.

But we hear and see very little about another holocaust, the instantaneous slaughter of 140,000 citizens of Hiroshima.

The photo-documentary exhibit “Hiroshima” at the Museum of Photographic Arts is an effort to portray the nuclear horrors released at 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945. The exhibition, unfortunately, has mixed its messages to an unsatisfying degree.

Actually, there are two shows. One, which subtly seeks to point up the difference between those surviving victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and ordinary people, is overshadowed by a graphic, 20-minute color video of burned victims of the bombing.

One attempts to show the emotional and psychological scars, and the other relentlessly portrays the physical suffering in an anti-nuclear arms statement.

One was compiled in Japan and brought to this country by the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, N.Y. Japanese photographer Hiromi Tsuchida said he seeks to portray the great gulf between ordinary people and the victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 154 black-and-white photographs and the accompanying wall texts. The exhibit reflects the same pictures and information Tsuchida put into a book titled “Hiroshima.”

The other show is the 20-minute video, the “The Lost Generation.” Narrated by Jane Fonda, the video contains intentionally grisly footage--discretion is urged in viewing the tape--and is an anti-war, anti-nuclear bomb statement that rides roughshod over Tsuchida’s quiet, subtle photography.

Tsuchida has divided his images into three groups: A series of photographs depicting the present-day life of victims; a section documenting trees, buildings and bridges that survived the Aug. 6, 1945, blast, and a number of stark prints of items from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum--clothing, watches and utensils--that remained intact after the bombing.

Tsuchida’s strongest photographs are his straightforward depictions of the museum pieces. Clean and precise, they frequently look like the items themselves under glass. A wrinkled air-raid hood that resembles a winter jacket hood, a pair of trousers with one leg torn away, a student’s stained dress silently evoke the bomb’s impact on human lives.

With no other items in a picture for a comparison of size, a woman’s dress looks like a miniature of the original, somehow shrunken and dwarfed by a bomb that forever changed the world.

Wall texts that give a brief history of each item amplify the visual effect of the photographs. Tsuchida photographed many pieces of clothing--one school uniform was found on a tree branch--identified by parents as belonging to children whose bodies were never found.

In his photographs of the contemporary victims and of the buildings and bridges that were not destroyed by the bomb, Tsuchida reaches for a more low-key effect.

The people look normal. He has caught them at home and at play. Most appear to be leading regular lives. What’s different is their history.

Sumiko Sugimoto was a 5-year-old girl who lived less than a mile from the blast. Tsuchida has caught the 38-year-old Sugimoto at a bowling alley. She looks like any other bowler snapped in a picture-perfect delivery. The wall caption tells the secret she carries with her:

“My mother had left for the nearby factory early that morning. In my house were grandmother and my sick father. Becoming bored, I thought to go out. Having worn only a pair of trousers without any reasons, I was putting on my sandals at the entrance when . . . “ Sugimoto lost her father and two older brothers in the bombing, and her mother was injured.

Tsuchida’s pictures of the surviving buildings and trees reveal that Hiroshima, in the years since the bombing, has rebuilt itself around them. Here, he has purposely avoided arty photographs. Traffic and power lines obscure the view. Because the structures such as the Fukoku Life Insurance Building (600 feet from the blast) or the Bureau of City Planning (900 feet from the site) are still in use, a visitor would not know what these war relics have seen without the aid of identifying plaques.

Tsuchida’s photography basically eschews powerful images. He works in a style of minimization, of understatement.

On the other hand, the 20-minute color video “The Lost Generation” comes from a completely different direction. It is a noisy, anti-war polemic.

“The Lost Generation” contains unforgetable images of burn victims under treatment in the days after the blast, footage formerly classified by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey.

As a historic document with firsthand accounts by the survivors, “The Lost Generation” has undeniable importance, and as an anti-war piece it packs a laudable punch.

But the video’s horrific images overwhelm Tsuchida’s work. One wonders whether MOPA, which added the video to the traveling exhibit, simply did not trust Tsuchida’s soft-spoken images, or whether the museum sought to use them as a vehicle to make an entirely different statement.