DOI: 10.4324/9781003246893-11
8 Witnesses to Radioactive
Contamination
Eva Castringius
Prologue
On the morning of the ninth, a man who suspected nothing had been
leaning on this wall. And then the flash came. And at that moment, the
wall was a glowing surface, and the man had turned to ash.
Unburned, by contrast, was the part of the wall that the man had
covered in the last fraction of his last second. This piece was recorded
by the flash photograph. As a negative. He had preserved this piece. He
had preserved himself in this negative. For it is the only trace that has
remained of his days on earth. And the only one that will remain of his
days on earth.
What, then, will remain of us? 1
In this quotation from Der Mann auf der Brücke: Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und
Nagasaki (The Man on the Bridge: Diary from Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the
philosopher and writer Günther Anders is referring to a photograph that he
found in the Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki. The photograph shows
the results of dropping the plutonium bomb “Fat Man” over Nagasaki on
August 9, 1945, at 11:02 a.m.: A shadow is marked on a wall, showing the
burned remnants of a human body. The dead are inscribed like shadows in
their surroundings, thus depicting an enduring and determined state that
in Günther Anders’s book becomes the epitome of the omnipresent threat
of atomic extermination. 2 In the quotation above, the author establishes an
analogy between the consequences of the explosion and the photograph. He
compares the creation of a human silhouette with the technique of the photogram. The figure is projected onto the ground by a light source. In this
case, the “negative” is produced by the atomic flash that left behind dramatic
traces in Nagasaki. 3
Photographic Traces
In Camera Lucida, the photograph of his deceased mother represents an
important motivation for Roland Barthes to rethink photography: “The
photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which
8 Witnesses to Radioactive
Contamination
Eva Castringius
Prologue
On the morning of the ninth, a man who suspected nothing had been
leaning on this wall. And then the flash came. And at that moment, the
wall was a glowing surface, and the man had turned to ash.
Unburned, by contrast, was the part of the wall that the man had
covered in the last fraction of his last second. This piece was recorded
by the flash photograph. As a negative. He had preserved this piece. He
had preserved himself in this negative. For it is the only trace that has
remained of his days on earth. And the only one that will remain of his
days on earth.
What, then, will remain of us? 1
In this quotation from Der Mann auf der Brücke: Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und
Nagasaki (The Man on the Bridge: Diary from Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the
philosopher and writer Günther Anders is referring to a photograph that he
found in the Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki. The photograph shows
the results of dropping the plutonium bomb “Fat Man” over Nagasaki on
August 9, 1945, at 11:02 a.m.: A shadow is marked on a wall, showing the
burned remnants of a human body. The dead are inscribed like shadows in
their surroundings, thus depicting an enduring and determined state that
in Günther Anders’s book becomes the epitome of the omnipresent threat
of atomic extermination. 2 In the quotation above, the author establishes an
analogy between the consequences of the explosion and the photograph. He
compares the creation of a human silhouette with the technique of the photogram. The figure is projected onto the ground by a light source. In this
case, the “negative” is produced by the atomic flash that left behind dramatic
traces in Nagasaki. 3
Photographic Traces
In Camera Lucida, the photograph of his deceased mother represents an
important motivation for Roland Barthes to rethink photography: “The
photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which