GoKawiilThe mushroom cloud is an iconic symbol of the nuclear age, and photographs of the clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki are frequently used as a short-hand for gesturing at the terrible power unleashed at the end of World War II. The most familiar of these photographs are two taken from planes involved in the missions themselves. For Hiroshima, the American documentary record is relatively sparse, as the focus was primarily on performing the mission — not documenting it.
The most familiar of these photos was taken by S/Sgt. George Robert (“Bob”) Caron, the tail gunner on the Enola Gay, the B-29 which dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb over Hiroshima:
Mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, by Robert Caron. Source: Photograph 58189 A.C., NARA .
This photograph is surely cropped in the darkroom from a larger negative; it has the gauzy appearance of too little resolution being blown up to too large a size. It is, from a technical perspective, not that great a photograph — the lighting is poor, the focus is poor. This is not an artistic critique, as it was essentially an amateur snapshot taken by a soldier in a combat zone. It does highlight the separation between the “head” of the mushroom cloud and the “stem” of it, a consequence of the weapon’s height of burst.
There is another photograph by Caron that gives us a sense of how much the previous one was cropped. This one is far less commonly used, but I prefer it greatly:
Hiroshima, very shortly after the explosion, photograph from the Enola Gay by S/Sgt. George Robert Caron. Source: Library of Congress .
I feel that whatever the cropped version gains in terms of getting a better view of the cloud, it loses its sense of scale and immediacy. The wider shot allows one to better imagine what it would look like to be seeing this in real life, from the air, and gives a better sense of scale — especially since most of us today are very familiar with the view from outside of an airplane.
Is the first photograph simply the cropped version of the second? I think not. If you superimpose them, as I have done below, you can see that there are some key differences:
Even barring my own alignment issues, the cropped photograph (581589 A.C.) seems to have been taken a bit earlier than the second one, as the “head” and “stem” separation is a bit different, the “head” is reaching a bit more upward in the second photograph, and, importantly, the entire cloud is rotated slightly along the axis, presumably because of the movement of the plane. It is difficult to tell but one suspect that the cropped photograph was used (and cropped) because it had slightly more definition in the final cloud than the second one.
There is another photo of Hiroshima after the bombing that is often used to illustrate its cloud:
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