Stanley Troutman (1917 – 2020) was one of the first American journalists to document the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombs had been dropped. Along with one other photographer and ten correspondents, they landed in Hiroshima a month to the day after the explosion. From the airplane as they prepared to land Stanley could see the amount of damage, describing the effects of the bomb as “a pebble dropping into a lake.”
The waves of the bomb spread far and wide, wiping out some areas while jumping over others. “It was hard for me to realize one bomb could do so much damage.” Stanley photographed Japanese civilians with burns on their bodies along with rubble and desolation the bomb left in its wake.
One of Troutman's iconic frames was of the former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, largely intact but damaged on the splintered moonscape of the once-vibrant city.
In the center-weighted shot, Life magazine writer Bernard Hoffman stands in the rubble facing the building, its distinctive dome skeletal but upright. The ruin is now the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, or Genbaku Dome.Bernard Hoffman stands next to a tiled fireplace where a house once stood in Hiroshima, Japan, on Sept. 7, 1945. The vast ruin is a result of "Little Boy," the uranium atomic bomb detonated on Aug. 6 by the U.S., leading to the end of World War II. (AP Photo/Stanley Troutman)Damage from the atomic bomb is seen in Nagasaki, Japan, on Sept. 13, 1945.A man pushes a loaded bicycle down a cleared path in a flattened area of Nagasaki more than a month after the nuclear attack in 1945.Two survivors walk through levelled Hiroshima in September 1945.A twisted mass of steel, marks the site of a large building in the industrial centre of atomized Hiroshima, Japan, on Sept. 13, 1945, directly behind, in grim contrast, a partly demolished building towers up, amid acres of gutted and fire blackened debris. (AP Photo)About one month after the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945, an allied correspondent examines the landscape of destruction at Hiroshima, Japan. (AP Photo)In this 1945 file photo, twisted metal and rubble marks what once was Hiroshima, Japan's most industrialized city, seen some time after the atom bomb was dropped here. (AP Photo)Photograph shows a man among the ruins of burned out machinery after bombings.Tokyo's Fifth Avenue in shambles / ACME photo by Stanley Troutman.
