Kei
Ito

2017 W/SW Juried Exhibition Application Portfolio

"It Made Angels Out of Everybody"

In the high summer of 1945, a specially modified B-29 called Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb named Little Boy onto the city of Hiroshima. My grandfather, only a fifteen-year-old boy at the time, was exposed to and witnessed the light that took away his family. Many years later, it took his life in the form of cancer. In the same time in NY, Willem de Kooning commented about the A-bomb that "Today, Some people think that the light of the atom bomb will change the concept of painting once and for all. The eyes that actually saw the light melted out of sheer ecstasy, For one instant, everybody was the same color. It made angels out of everybody."

These prints were made by exposing a Type-C photographic paper to sunlight. The inverted image of an airplane was formed with the shadow of a toy model of the Enola Gay onto the light sensitive paper. The airplane delivered the purest light which vaporized entire bodies of innocents, leaving only their shadows. 

The light cast by the innocent Little Boy on that fatal day created the darkest shadow known in history. The shadow grows and spreads as time continues, which allows little boys in their castles to obtain mountains of toys filled with atomic light. 

Should the future bear witness to this light, there will be none left to be called angels.