Found in Watertown, MA: a suitcase of forgotten photos taken in the immediate aftermath of atom bomb drop on Hiroshima.

There's this one photograph, it's the last one in the article, where you see is the outline of this pair of feet on a bridge.

What it looks like: A chalk outline of feet.

What it was: A person right up until the bomb fell.

This is why I want to smack the shit out of people who joke about dropping nukes on another country. It isn't like some other photos of the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't already public. (WARNING: REALLY DISTURBING PHOTOS OF DEAD AND DYING PEOPLE! Click only if you're serious.)

While the Watertown find contains no people, there is something incredibly eerie about them, due in large part to the utter lack of life. So, seriously. If you're easily triggered, you may not want to go look.

Although I recommend you do. Maybe if more people took a really good look at those photos, maybe some people wouldn't joke so light-heartedly about war, let alone using nukes.

In addition, the article is pretty interesting. It's a real-life mystery that searches for where the photos came from, and how they ended up in Watertown, Massachusetts.

My favorite passage in the piece:

The lack of visual evidence of the atom bomb’s effect has helped us to forget its devastating impact. To see is to remember. Up until now, there have been few publicly available images of what happened on the ground when the first atomic bomb exploded. As a result, Hiroshima has become, as the novelist Mary McCarthy wrote in 1946, “a kind of hole in human history.”

These images go some way towards filling in this hole in our historical memory. Taken during the weeks following the bombing, they show a landscape that is eerily vacant and quiet, like ruins from a vanished civilization. But why were they taken and by whom? And how is it that they ended up in a pile of garbage?

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