Yoshito Matsushige, a photojournalist and peace activist famous for his photos of Hiroshima taken shortly after the U.S. atomic bombing, died Sunday of acute kidney failure at a hospital in the city, his family said Monday. He was 92.
A Hiroshima native, Matsushige took photographs of the devastated city on Aug. 6, 1945, the day of the bombing, while he was working as a photographer for the Chugoku Shimbun.
One of his photographs, taken three hours after the bombing, depicted shell-shocked residents at a location 2.3 km from ground zero and was published in Life magazine. It is currently kept at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
After retiring from the Chugoku Shimbun, Matsushige became a peace activist and conveyed his experience of witnessing the horror of the bombing and gave speeches at home and abroad, including at the United Nations General Assembly.
He committed himself to photographing buildings destroyed by the blast and subsequent urban development after the war and the preservation of such photographs.
He also published books and photo essays on the bombing.