Here’s a link to possibly the best assignment/story (with a small news update) I’ve ever worked on, by one of the best journalists I’ve ever worked with- Richard Lloyd Parry, of The Times – the story of double Hibakusha ( or double atomic bomb survivors), that is people who were in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and got bombed twice, and somehow survived.

One of those people was Tsutomu Yamaguchi, whom Richard and I, and colleague Onoki-san, sat with a few years ago in his garden in Nagasaki, eating fruit and listening to his horrific memories of those two days in 1945. Yamaguchi-san’s status as a survivor of both bombings has finally been recognised by the Nagasaki local government.

Here is a link to the full set of photographs of double-Hibakusha ( or double atomic bomb) survivors series.

It is the type of assignment I got into photography for, to hear stories first hand, to experience things first hand. To sit and listen to Yamaguchi-san tell his story was incredible, sitting in his garden, the sunshine, the fruit, his words, the translation, the imagery he evoked, his crying and sobbing, this 90 year old man crying beside you as he recalled the horrors, me photographing him crying, Richard stopping writing whilst Yamaguchi-san sobbed. The ants scurrying on the table and fruit, and then Yamaguchi-san’s daughter helping him from his chair and garden over to where his dog was being restrained, and Yamaguchi-san patting his dog in the sunshine, as he shuffled off to suffer nightmares ( as his daughter warned us) for a few days now that we’d re-awakened the nightmares….