This shocking image is not, in fact, an animal's carcass strung up in a slaughterhouse, but a common beer bottle, deformed beyond recognition by the atomic blast in Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Shōmei Tōmatsu was 15 when we dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, but it wasn’t until the 1960s, when he was sent by the Japanese government to document Nagasaki, that he understood the horror, especially of the hibakusha, the scarred survivors of the bomb. This image—bloodless yet appalling—implicitly asks: what madness makes us herd towards catastrophe, only to learn once again that nothing is inevitable?

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