Hiroshima Collection is one part of Hiromi Tsuchida’s (b. 1939 in Fukui; lives and works in Tokyo) Hiroshima Trilogy, a decades-long project that reflects on the people, landscape, material remains, and continued resonance of the United States’ indiscriminate detonation of an atomic bomb on the city in 1945. Tens of thousands of people were killed by the bomb in Hiroshima, which, along with the second bomb dropped on Nagasaki, led to the end of World War II. Hiroshima Collection was produced during two periods in 1982 and 1995, when Tsuchida photographed objects from the collection of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which displays and preserves materials related to the bombing. Each work documents a personal belonging of a victim of the explosion—a watch, a lunch box, a school uniform—paired with available information about its owner and their distance from the explosion’s epicenter. Reflecting on this project at the age of 82, the artist has said, “I felt I needed to learn and share knowledge beyond the history we all know. The outer scars, like keloids, are only the surface of what this problem encapsulates. We overlook these scars or these experiences that are in fact part of our own civilization and our community.”
