Explosion of the Hindenburg

Explosion of the Hindenburg Lakehurst, N.J.
Photograph by Charles Hoff. May 6, 1937.
(via Artstor)

On the evening of May 6, 1937, at the end of its flight across the Atlantic Ocean from Hamburg, Germany to Lakehurst, New Jersey, the airship Hindenburg caught fire and exploded, taking the lives of 35 passengers and crew [1]. This voyage of the Hindenburg was the first transatlantic flight from Germany to the U.S., though it had made a trip from Germany to Brazil the previous year. Many news stations, journalists, and radio announcers turned out to record and celebrate the airship's landing in New Jersey but ended up instead documenting its disaster. Charles Hoff was a photographer for the Daily News on assignment to document the airship's landing and captured this singlular image of the Hindenburg's explosion [2]. It took less than forty seconds for the Hindenburg to go up in flames, but that time was all that was needed to capture its image. This print is currently housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art [3].

This photograph and others like it were used in newspapers around the country in the days following the event. The impact of the Hindenburg's explosion was catastrophic, not only for the victims of the explosion, but for the entire airship industry. After such a massive, deadly, and widely broadcast disaster, the public lost faith in the safety of airships. The front page of the Daily News for May 7 had the headline "HINDENBURG EXPLODES! 100 DEAD" [4] -- a gross overestimation, but representative of the fear the explosion had put into people. LIFE Magazine wrote a report of the explosion a couple weeks afterward, describing the explosion and its aftermath: "In five minutes the fire had burned itself out, leaving 35 dead and one more twisted wreck to add to the dismal history of lighter-than-air craft" [5]. Even two weeks after the explosion, prolific news sources such as LIFE had lost faith in airships and were declaring the industry dead. This, coupled with the relative speed of transatlantic flight on winged aircraft (compared to airships), essentially killed the airship industry.

The power of this image is in its alarming impact on the viewer, especially to a viewer in 1937 just days or weeks after the explosion. After such guarantees were made as to the safety of airships, the realization that this kind of accident could happen at any moment must have sent a tremor through the public. Even seventy five years after this accident, this photograph still evokes a sense of horror that such an unforeseen calamity could occur so quickly, and just as quickly change the way the world viewed lighter-than-air travel. In "Looking at War," Sontag writes that "non-stop imagery (television, streaming video, movies) surrounds us, but, when it comes to remembering, the photograph has the deeper bite" [6]. There are videos of the explosion that were shown on television after the fact. But what most people remember is the photograph.

This image is striking because it was not supposed to be a photograph of a disaster. The explosion of the Hindenburg was never anticipated, and as a result any photograph that came out of it was as much of a surprise as the explosion itself. What was supposed to be a routine documentation of a momentous event has instead become a shocking, devastating photo.


References:
[1] LIFE Magazine. May 17, 1937. http://books.google.com/books?id=xkQEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA26&dq=Hindenburg+life+magazine+1937&cd=6#v=onepage&q&f=false
[2] The Daily News. Hindenburg Disaster May 6, 1937 - 75th Anniversary. http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/hindenburg-disaster-6-1937-75th-anniversary-gallery-1.1072697?pmSlide=3
[3] http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/search-the-collections/190017159
[4] The Daily News. Hindenburg Disaster May 6, 1937 - 75th Anniversary. http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/hindenburg-disaster-6-1937-75th-anniversary-gallery-1.1072697?pmSlide=12
[5] LIFE Magazine. May 17, 1937.
[6] Sontag, Susan. (2002, September 12). Looking at War. The New Yorker. p. 4