“Heavy Sky” : Hiroshima, 16th February 2011
Last winter I bought a 10-24mm wide-angle lens and wanted to test it out, so one cold weekend I climbed up Hiroshima’s Futabayama and pointed the camera south.
In the foreground lies the city, the typical ugly concrete and wires of modern urban Japan, but if you look carefully (especially if you view the larger version), you can see the Inland Sea in the distance, dotted with small islands that make refreshing day trips out of the grey industrial blight . This body of water separates the main Japanese island of Honshu from Shikoku, the smallest and most rural of the four major landmasses that make up the nation.
Below this forbidding heavy sky I shared the mountain with a large metal pagoda, a gift from the government of India to memorialise the victims of the atomic bomb, the perfect apocalyptic accompaniment to the roiling storm clouds above…
