The Art of Memory
For Cannon Hersey, Hiroshima Is A Living Inheritance

By Clementina Verge
Photos by Sabrina Eberhard

In Hiroshima, about 170 trees survived the atomic bombing. Eight decades later, they continue to grow. In Dover Plains, artist Cannon Hersey has documented more than 60 of them through photography and sculpture, drawn to their duality: living witnesses to devastation, yet symbols of renewal and resilience.
Hersey understands that tension instinctively. The grandson of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Hersey—whose 1946 Hiroshima brought the experiences of six survivors to American readers—has spent much of his life exploring what happens when memory passes from one generation to the next.
He has traveled to Hiroshima some 40 times, developing a concept he calls “future memory”: exploring how people who did not experience history firsthand can still understand and feel its consequences. As survivors die, history risks becoming abstraction. Art, Hersey believes, gives it form again.
His collaboration with Japanese artist Akira Fujimoto uses 3D technology to reimagine artifacts recovered from the devastation: a pocket watch and fountain pen become a bronze sculpture; a child’s tricycle becomes a timeless reminder of lives interrupted. These objects have served as reminders and conversation starters from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum to galleries in New York and Geneva.
“Art is a social language,” he explains. “The kind of storytelling that doesn’t tell an audience what to think. Rather, it gives people room to imagine, interpret, and decide what they feel, because truth is varied.”
That philosophy led to the founding of 1FUTURE, a creative platform bringing artists, innovators, and audiences together around subjects from conflict and climate to discrimination and inequality. With his wife, Indira, he has opened their home for those conversations—among
the guests has been Koko Kondo, a Hiroshima survivor and the daughter of Kiyoshi Tanimoto. Tanimoto, a Methodist minister, survived the bombing and became one of the central figures in John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Decades later, while researching his grandfather’s papers at Yale, Hersey discovered Tanimoto’s long-lost memoir—written in English, an eyewitness account of August 6, 1945. Recently published, it returns Tanimoto’s firsthand testimony to a new generation, and in an unexpected turn, brings his story back to the Hersey family decades after John Hersey first recorded it.
The memoir inspired Hiroshima, 8:15, a feature film projected for release in spring 2028. Hersey serves as a producer alongside Japanese filmmaker Taku Nishimae. The title marks the moment the bomb fell, but for Hersey the story cannot be reduced to that instant. It is also about who became allies, resilience born from devastation, and relationships formed in the aftermath.
His grandfather honored survivors through journalism. Tanimoto preserved the experience in memoir. Hibakujumoku—survivor trees— uphold their testimony in bark and rings. Through art, Hersey is building another link in that chain, and perhaps the most intimate expression of his idea of “future memory” is found at home, watching his young daughters begin to understand that stories matter.
“History is not simply what happened before we were born,” Hersey reflects. “It is something we inherit—and have a responsibility to carry.” —www.1future.jp