Bomb Stamps

In 1992 I was in my neighborhood Post Office in San Francisco. As I stood in line, I saw a poster that announced a series of US stamps that would mark the 50th commemoration of World War II. The stamps would be issued ten each year between 1992 and 1995 that depicted wartime events from 1941 to 1945. Only stamps for 1942 were shown on the poster.

Based on my experience co-directing and co-producing the film, Dark Circle, with Judy Irving and Ruth Landy, a film about the connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, I began to wonder how the end of World War II would be depicted.

According to many histories and opinions, World War II ended with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Histories and opinions are divided as well among those who feel the bombs were necessary or not, among those who feel the United States had committed an immoral act and those who believed the bombings were a justified act of warfare that saved lives both Japanese and American.

My question was more simple. How would I depict the end of World War II?

I thought immediately of photographs taken in Nagasaki the day after the bombing by the Japanese photographer, Yosuke Yamahata.

During the making of Dark Circle, I had met Tsotomu Iwakura who dedicated his life to gathering all the photographs and motion picture film of the atomic bombings in an archive. Mr. Iwakura authored a book Hiroshima-Nagasaki: A Pictorial Record of the Atomic Destruction that he presented to me and the Dark Circle project.

In that book I was struck by how many images of the atomic bomb aftermath were taken by the same man and only on one day. I wanted to understand the story behind the photographs. Mr. Iwakura offered the basic outline of the photographs and introduced me to the son and wife of the photographer. Mr. Yamahata passed away from cancer in 1966.

In the meeting with Shogo Yamahata we obtained permission to use Mr. Yamahata’s photographs in Dark Circle which premiered at the New York Film Festival in 1982. Since that time I had tried without success to interest gallery owners and museums to show Mr. Yamahata’s Nagasaki photographs.

My next thought was that the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombings might provide an occasion to interest others in showing Mr. Yamahata’s work. I was correct in my assumption.

As for the Post Office stamps—The initial design depicted an aerial photograph of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, a rough cloud, not the mushroom shape that became iconic through images of atmospheric testing, an image obviously without any depiction of what was taking place on the ground far below.

The final choice was taken from an Alfred Eisenstadt photograph taken in Times Square, New York City, August 14, 1945: a man in a Navy uniform kissing a woman in a white dress. The content of the photograph has been a topic of critical discussion since the photograph was published in Life Magazine two weeks after the photo was taken.