Exposed in a Hundred Suns | Takashi Arai

Survivors live on the periphery of this event, while those at its centre – the dead – remain voiceless. Since 1945, thousands of nuclear tests have been conducted, each unleashing the force of a hundred suns. With each test, with each hibakusha (downwinder – an individual or community contaminated by nuclear explosion), the histories of atomic devastation multiply, forming an accretion disc of memories around the hypocentre. From a distance, this disc appears static, but within it, the storm of trauma continues to rage.

Exposed in a Hundred Suns is an ongoing photographic exploration of nuclear histories across Japan, the United States, and the Marshall Islands. It builds on Arai’s earlier series Here and There – Tomorrow’s History, a daguerreotype project following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. The project’s methodology involves circling around nuclear monuments as though navigating the gravitational pull of an unapproachable hypocentre. Photographing these sites with hundreds of six-by-six-centimetre daguerreotypes often takes months, producing what Arai calls micro-monuments – fragments of history shaped through the physical act of seeing.

While growing up in Japan during the Cold War, Arai heard firsthand accounts from hibakushas, survivors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki who visited his school. His imagination of the nuclear apocalypse was also shaped by films and cartoons, often from Hollywood. The iconic mushroom cloud, an image seared into global consciousness, was rarely witnessed firsthand in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Instead, it was photographed from above – by the very B-29 bombers that participated in the attack – and disseminated through media and textbooks. In this way, Japan’s visual memory of the bombings was shaped retrospectively, often through external perspectives. The scarcity of direct visual representations in Japan was not only due to post-war censorship by the General Headquarters (GHQ), the allied occupation authority that continued until 1949, but also by Japanese society’s distinctive approaches to collective trauma, memory, and grieving, often associated with a victimised view of its history.

Exposed in a Hundred Suns also turns its focus towards personal belongings and overlooked sites, such as the futon of a Lucky Dragon V crew member or Imperial Japan’s execution site in the Marshall Islands. By revealing these counter-narratives, the project challenges dominant historical representations and invites new ways of seeing.