What can a suitcase, found in a pile of garbage, tell us about Hiroshima and its legacy?
The suitcase was found eleven years ago by a man who was out taking his dog for a walk in Watertown, Massachusetts. Inside were 700 photographs of post-bomb Hiroshima. The images depict an annihilated city: twisted girders, imploded buildings, miles of rubble. This was the original Ground Zero, a term first used in 1946 to describe the epicenter of the blast.
1946 was also the same year that the writer Mary McCarthy called our understanding of Hiroshima "a kind of hole in human history."
Since then, accounts by survivors of the bombing have been published, documentaries have been produced and historians have fiercely debated the decision of why the bomb was dropped in the first place.
And yet the photographic record of what took place in Hiroshima has long been absent. Our lack of visual evidence of the atom bomb's effect has helped us to deny its devastating impact.