Visually impaired girl's photo incorrectly shared as the one who saw the Nuclear blast in Hiroshima - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
December 14, 2022
A photo of a visually impaired girl is being shared on social media with a claim that she witnessed the Nuclear blast in Hiroshima in 1945. Let’s fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Photo of a girl who saw the Hiroshima nuclear bomb blast in Japan in 1945.
Fact: This picture was captured by a Swedish photographer named Christer Strömholm in 1963. This photo is uploaded on his official website with the caption, The Blind Girl- Hiroshima 1963. It is therefore not possible that she could have witnessed the nuclear blast in 1945. Hence the claim made in the post is MISLEADING.
We performed a reverse image search using the photo in the post and found the same image in a few auction websites (here and here), which credited this photo to Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm. Further investigation led us to the official website of Christer Strömholm, in which this photo was available. It is captioned ‘ The Blind Girl- Hiroshima 1963.’
The Hiroshima Nuclear bomb blast happened in 1945; if this girl were even one year old at that time, by 1963, she would be 19 years. But the girl in the picture does not look like a 19 year old.  Although the photo was taken in Hiroshima, the viral post misquotes it as the picture of a child who had seen the nuclear bomb blast. The same picture was earlier debunked by Snopes. Snopes stated that “It might be the case that the pictured girl’s blindness was not directly caused by her exposure to the nuclear blast itself, but by something that took place much later in the aftermath of that blast, including a congenital disorder in a child born to survivors who were exposed to radiation.”
To summarise, this post shares a visually impaired girl’s photo with an incorrect caption that she saw the Nuclear blast in Hiroshima in 1945.