Yōsuke Yamahata

was a Japanese photographer best known for extensively photographing Nagasaki the day after it was bombed.

Biography Yamahata was born in Singapore on 6 August 1917; his father, Shōgyoku Yamahata (, later to become known as a photographer) had a job there related to photography. He went to Tokyo in 1925 and eventually started at Hosei University (Tokyo) but dropped out in 1936 to work in G. T. Sun (, Jīchīsan Shōkai, aka Graphic Times Sun), a photographic company run by his father. One which was used in Life, also appeared in the 1955 exhibition and book "The Family of Man" an exhibition created for The Museum of Modern Art by Edward Steichen, which was seen by 9 million visitors worldwide. One of the less graphic, but more affecting images, it depicted a bewildered little boy, clutching a rice ball, with shrapnel cuts to the face. The head-and-torso enlargement was cropped tightly from a negative that had also showed his mother, also with facial wounds, standing behind, against a background of railway tracks.

Illness and death Yamahata became violently ill in 1965, on his forty-eighth birthday and the twentieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. He was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the duodenum.

Gallery

Books of Yamahata's works

Kiroku-shashin: Genbaku no Nagasaki . Daiichi Shuppansha, 1952. Genbaku no Nagasaki . Tokyo: Gakufū Shoin, 1959. Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata August 10, 1945. San Francisco: Pomegranate, 1995. . Nagasaki yomigaeru genbaku shashin . Tokyo: NHK, 1995. . Yamahata Yōsuke . Nihon no shashinka 23. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1998. .