The A-Bomb's Human Shadow and the Strata of Visuality

The Provenance of the Image Inscribed by the A-Bomb's Rays

Abstract

The human shadow that the rays of the A-bomb inscribed on a building in Hiroshima remains even today. In the postwar era, the human shadow has been incorporated into the historical narrative. This paper will be less focused on the reduction of the human shadow to a semantic network than on its role in concealing the strata of visibility. By analyzing the constitutive elements of the process of the production of the human shadow, I will seek to clarify how the human shadow appeared as an image in the social plane at a time when, more than in the nineteenth century modernist vision, the physiological human body had become a target of control and an object of technological assemblage.