“It’s my bomb… It’s been waiting for me for sixty years.”
Hiroshima Bound uses an essay style to track the construction of America’s collective memory (or lack of one) of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, tracing the histories of specific photos and photographers, both Japanese and American, who visited Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the aftermath of the bombings, counterposing their visual legacy with the stories of survivors whose practice of speaking to small groups of students offers a modest but powerful counter-history to the official record. Using the maker’s own legacy as a child of the Atomic Age the film asks viewers to rethink the representation of mass death and the role of the archive in the digital era, taking viewers on a haunting reverse pilgrimage to the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, the International Center of Photography in New York, and to contemporary Hiroshima, in order to explore and ‘unpack’ the trauma and myth surrounding the culture of Hiroshima representation.
Additional video link: https://martinlucas.net/