Yōsuke Yamahata

• Name — Yōsuke Yamahata • Native Name — 山端 庸介 • Born — August 6, 1917 • Birthplace — Singapore, Straits Settlements • Died — April 18, 1966 August 6, 1917 • Place of death — Tokyo, Japan • Occupation — Photographer

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.

Yamahata's photographs appeared swiftly in Japan, for example in the August 21 issue of Mainichi Shinbun. After the GHQ's restrictions on coverage of the effects of the atomic bomb were lifted earlier in 1952, his photographs of Nagasaki appeared in the September 29 issue of Life. The same year, they appeared in the book Kiroku-shashin: Genbaku no Nagasaki. 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.

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.

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".

• Illustration — A boy holding a rice ball, which is one of Yamahata's famous photos • Illustration — A mother and her child leaving the first-aid station after receiving rations • Illustration — A mother and a child waiting for the turn of treatment in front of Michino'o station, Nagasaki City • Illustration — Victims of atomic bombing • Illustration — A charred body and a woman stunned with shock • Illustration — Survivors of the atomic bombing • Illustration — Victims of the atomic bombing • Illustration — Partially incinerated child in Nagasaki