In 2025, eighty years after the end of the Second World War, NHK Publishing released *Hiroshima Collection*, a photobook by Hiromi Tsuchida. The book gathers photographs of A-bomb artifacts held by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, turning the camera toward objects that survived the bombing and now serve as material witnesses. Tsuchida, whose long engagement with Hiroshima spans several decades, approaches these items not as illustrations of history but as subjects in their own right, recording them with the attention usually reserved for portraits.
The book appears alongside a companion volume, *Hiroshima Monument*, and shares its designer, Atsuki Kikuchi. Together, the two publications form a coordinated project: one addresses the memorial landscape, the other the collection of artifacts. *Hiroshima Collection* contains more than three hundred items from the museum’s holdings, a scale that allows the reader to grasp the range and texture of what remains—fragments of clothing, household objects, personal effects—without reducing them to a single narrative. The sequencing and design are integral to the book’s argument, giving each object room to register while also building a cumulative weight.
Tsuchida’s approach is restrained. He photographs the artifacts under controlled conditions, avoiding dramatic lighting or sentimental framing. The result is a body of images that asks the viewer to look closely at things that are often difficult to look at. The book’s significance lies in this tension: it is a record of destruction, but also a study of preservation, and of the museum’s role in shaping how the past is encountered. For collectors interested in postwar Japanese photography, Tsuchida’s work on Hiroshima is a sustained inquiry, and this volume extends it into the space of the archive.
Published in July 2025, *Hiroshima Collection* is a contemporary document rather than a historical reprint. Its value for a serious collector rests on the coherence of its project—the pairing with *Hiroshima Monument*, the shared design, and the depth of the museum collection it makes available. It is a book that will be consulted not only for its images but for the questions it raises about how objects carry memory.
