"They Touched My Heart"
Photographs by Derrick Woollacott
FCCJ Main Bar
Dec. 5, 2015 to Jan.8, 2016
In January 1946, Sergeant Derrick Woollacott was a 22 year old photographer for the Royal Air Force, stationed in Iwakuni as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF). This exhibition displays a selection from a series of 100 personal photographs taken in and around Hiroshima Prefecture in 1946. As a young airman, fresh from the War in South East Asia, he was completely overwhelmed by the beauty and dignity of the Japanese people, an experience that changed his life forever. His images – all presented in full negative, uncropped – focus on Japanese people going about their lives and include stunning portraits of mothers and children, fishermen and farmers, taken mere months after the destruction of Hiroshima. While many were published at the time, and he won first, second and third prize in a photographic competition in the Mainichi English edition in October 1946, this is the first time that they have been seen in public since 1947.
Derrick Woollacott was born in England in 1923. Several of his Japanese photographs were published in England in 1947. He was an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society and made his living as a professional photographer until the late 1970s when he started to work on various inventions for photographic processing and printing. He died in 1991. His daughter, Valerie Neale, is researching his photographic history in Japan and South-East Asia in 1945-6, and has written an as-yet unpublished book about these years.
The Exhibitions Committe