Remembering Hiroshima: photographs as cultural artifacts and memory

In 1947, less than two years after an atomic bomb exploded over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing tens of thousands of civilians, the author’s father served in Hiroshima as part of an Australian contingency of the British Commonwealth Occupational Forces (B.C.O.F.). Photographs brought back by Keep’s father, depicting the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, have shaped the author’s understanding and memories of post-war Hiroshima. Using the field of memory studies as a theoretical framework in which to interrogate Keep’s family photographs, this paper examines how such photographic artifacts may serve as potent memory sites for the revisiting of people, places and events located in the past