BEARING WITNESS
apanese artists Iri and Toshi Maruki wanted the world to see what had happened in Hiroshima. Buildings aflame, corpses scorched like kindling, the air dense with flies and smoke. Horrors the couple couldn’t comprehend—only, these tableaux were the earliest artworks to portray human suffering in the wake of the world’s first-ever deployed atomic bomb—a weapon thought to have killed an estimated 140,000 Japanese both on and after August 6, 1945.
