Strangely, most of the war pictures are black and white. We can not see the red blood or the green military uniform. However, I can see the silence of the moment, the desperate emotion of the photograph. The picture I want to discuss about is the famous “Fat man bomb in Japan” which took on August 9, 1945.
Unlike other war pictures, this image does not include any people or buildings. It’s just a simple huge mushroom cloud over the Nagasaki. I feel like this moment is so powerful and scary, it is killing more than 60,000 people in one second. Under this mushroom cloud, there are tremendous dead body on the street, people even don’t have enough time to scream.
Like Susan said in her book, the picture reminds me the horrible history happened half century ago. However, what’s next then? After I felt horrified, nothing is going to be changed. We can not change the past, or the future, it is not our choice.
Sontag writes in her essay that we start to become numb towards these gruesome pictures especially wartime photos. We can feel sympathy for the “corpses” or the people that are in the photography but for how long? There are so many gruesome photos but there’s nothing we can do about it.