Friday, August 10, 2018

Facebook: Photographer Yōsuke Yamahata

I just learned of this photographer today, Mr. Yosuke Yamahata. He paid for the important social documentary photography he did with his life. His work will live on and continue to tell the terrible story of Nagasaki and the thousands who died (39000 to 80000).

Yosuke Yamahata
I picked up this copy of his book "Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata August 10, 1945" off Amazon for $22 CAD including free shipping.

https://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Yamahata+Y%C5%8Dsuke

"Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata August 10, 1945"

From Facebook (Jack Wilgus):
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August 10, 1945 - Yōsuke Yamahata is an important documentary photographer that we all should remember. He was born in Singapore on August 6, 1917. Yōsuke Yamahata was a Japanese photographer best known for extensively photographing Nagasaki the day after it was bombed, August 10, 1945. His father, Shōgyoku Yamahata had a job there related to photography. Yōsuke went to Tokyo in 1925 and eventually attended Hosei University (Tokyo) but dropped out in 1936 to work for the Graphic Times Sun, a photographic company run by his father. From 1940, Yamahata worked as a military photographer in China and elsewhere in Asia outside Japan; he returned to Japan in 1942. 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, probably caused by the residual effects of radiation received in Nagasaki in 1945. He is buried at Tama Cemetery, Tokyo.

Note: His photographs of Nagasaki were censored by the U.S. government to prevent distribution, until the restriction was lifted in 1952 and they appeared in “Life” magazine.