Lieutenant Dan McGovern stands amid the wreckage in Nagasaki, Japan at precisely the spot an atomic bomb had landed a month earlier. McGovern has a camera in hand, documenting one of the 20th century's most significant events.
On August 6, 1945, the U.S. detonated the world’s first wartime nuclear bomb over Hiroshima. An estimated 70,000 people died that day with another 70,000 perishing within four months from injury and radiation poisoning. On the ground, photojournalist Yoshito Matsushige miraculously survived unharmed despite living 1.7 miles from ground zero. Over the course of 10 hours, he could only bring himself to take 7 photos.
There's an unbelievable auction currently live on eBay that might rank as the most expensive item we've ever seen on the site. Uncovered by the folks over at The Phoblographer, the auction is offering hundreds of historic WWII prints, a Kodak Pocket camera, and an extremely rare negative of the Hiroshima bombing, all for the whopping buy-it-now price of $2,000,000.33.
On August 6th, 1945 Russell Gackenbach captured a historic, horrifying event on his personal camera. From the bowels of an Air Force bomber, he snapped two pictures of the first atomic bombing when a 9,000-pound uranium-235 bomb named 'Little Boy' obliterated the city of Hiroshima, Japan.
There are only a few (two, maybe three) ground-level photographs of the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing in existence, and one of the original prints just surfaced in the archives at Honkawa Elementary School in Hiroshima city.