Remembering Nagasaki

A separate award-winning web-site, Remembering Nagasaki, designed by Alison Sant, established and maintained by San Francisco’s Exploratorium Museum, is devoted to the international photographic exhibition, book and film entitled, Nagasaki Journey.

As the Nagasaki Journey exhibit took shape between 1992 and 1995, Rupert Jenkins contacted the San Francisco Exploratorium, founded by Robert Oppenheimer’s brother, Frank, to see if the Exploratorium wanted to be involved with our exhibition.

This approach was entirely in the hands of Rupert Jenkins, editor of the Nagasaki Journey book and Exhibition Consultant. Rupert in turn began working with Alison Sant then on staff at the Exploratorium.

From that process, Alison created the Remembering Nagasaki website. At the time, the internet was so new that I had no idea what a website was and did not have a computer that could connect to the internet—which makes the achievement of Alison Sant in those early internet years all that more meaningful and important, and beautiful.

The original plan was that Remembering Nagasaki would be on the internet only to coincide with the full Nagasaki Journey presentation at San Francisco’s Ansel Adams Center for Photography, something like three months. Then the website would be retired.

Alison had made the website interactive so people could offer their comments. The comments submitted and shown on the website were so many and so moving that the website continued in an interactive phase for years and can still be seen today at the point where the final comment was entered.

Alison Sant continues to work for a more just and sustainable world through her individual activities and as a co-founder with Richard Johnson of the Studio for Urban Projects, an interdisciplinary design collaborative based in San Francisco that works at the intersection of architecture, urbanism, art, and social activism.