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and what it would mean for Japan. How do you photograph radiation or visualize its future impact? “It was quite difficult for the first six months simply because it was too big,”
Okahara explains. Realizing the significance of the nuclear disaster was impossible to understand much less photograph, and that only time would reveal the true meaning of what
happened, Okahara decided to “collect fragments” and pack them away for the future.
Though he generally shoots with a Leica for his personal work and made color photographs
on assignment in Fukushima, for this project Okahara elected to use a 4 x 5 for the first time.
The deliberateness of large format seemed appropriate, he says, because he wanted “to focus
on each image and see each image as more important.”
In his black-and-white photographs we see a lifeguard’s platform on the seashore, it’s
railing hangs awkwardly from one side over an eerily peaceful sea. There are images of cattle, both alive, and dead and decaying. There are non-resident workers in masks attempting
to control the radiation in the area, and farmers in their fields working to decontaminate the
land. The images are quiet, stark and haunting.
© KosuKe oKahara
“This is not really a narrative or story,” Okahara says, “but more to understand what it
is for myself and for people in the future.” There is a bizarre feeling in Fukushima, Okahara
says, that he is trying to document with his photographs. He plans to work for another year
or two on his 4 x 5 images, then publish a book and exhibit the work. “I want to show this
project, these pictures, to our children, or children of children. I’m really hoping that people
in the future can take a look at my images and they can just imagine what it was.”
—Conor Risch
Dairy farmers from Namie, where radiation levels remain high, evacuated to
Motomiya city, 50km from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
restoring
Photos
After the
tsunami
In sortIng through the wreckage
left by the Tohoku tsunami, police,
fire departments and self-defense
forces found thousands of snapshots
and photo albums soaked with
seawater and caked with mud. In May
2011, Munemasa Takahashi, a Tokyo-
based fine-art photographer, traveled
to the devastated town of Yamamoto
in the Miyagi prefecture not to take
pictures but to join Salvage Memory,
one of the groups of volunteers who
were rinsing the photos and working to return them to their owners. The experience
made Takahashi realize the persistent value that photography has in our lives.
Before working with Salvage Memory, Takahashi had wondered if digital technology
had made photography so easy and commonplace, the act of taking a photo had become
thoughtless. “What I have discovered through this experience is that, even though the
process of taking photographs has become easier as the camera’s technology developed,
our desire to preserve the moments we live does not change at all,” Takahashi tells PDN,
speaking through translator and fellow Salvage Memory volunteer Sako Shimizu. “When
we lose everything, one of the first things we look for is our pictures filled with our past.”
The damaged photos show family vacations, birthday parties, and weddings and
other memories someone had once hoped to preserve. “They are the kind of photos
anyone in the world would take,” he says.
Once they were cleaned, the snapshots were posted in local schools and then scanned
and added to a digital database. With the help of facial recognition software, close to
30,000 of the photos and more than 2,000 photo albums have so far been returned to
their owners or to surviving family members. However, nearly as many photos were so
badly damaged that faces and details were impossible to identify. Rather than discard
them, Takahashi put them to use communicating to the rest of the world something that
had been missing from press reports about the Tohoku tragedy.
“It is difficult to imagine 100 different lives … when reading about a death toll of
a hundred in news reports,” he says, “but if you stand in front of these pictures, you
can really sense the presence of the people and be in the moment that they wanted to
capture with them.”
Takahashi organized photos from Yamamoto into an exhibition that was displayed
in Tokyo. Then, through friends and connections, he began looking for venues
overseas willing to donate space. In March, the show “Lost & Found” was on view at
Hiroshi Watanabe’s studio and
gallery space in West Hollywood,
California, and then in April, the
exhibit moved to the Aperture
Gallery in New York City.
He also designed four different
exhibition posters to sell at each
venue. All the money raised
through poster sales and donations
will be given to schools and
temporary shelters in Yamamoto.
Takahashi explains, “Undeniably
we have taken these photos out
of the town of Yamamoto without
their consent which is really not fair
to them.” Collecting donations, he
says, is a way to “give back to the
people in Yamamoto.”
Before the exhibition was
created, Takahashi also shot a video
of Yamamoto in order to convey
simultaneously what was lost and
what has endured. “I wanted to
convey through the sound of wind,
movements in the scenery and the words of a father of a friend of mine, that life goes
on in the community and the place does not stand still as ‘one of the affected areas.’”
© lost & found
Parts of the “Lost & Found” exhibit will eventually be shown in London, Paris and
Milan, each displayed in a slightly different way. While in West Hollywood, the photos
were posted edge-to-edge and covered the studio’s walls; at Aperture, each of the
thousands of photos were placed in simple, inexpensive frames, like the kind any
family might use to put photos on a shelf or hang on a wall. The display was at once
a reminder of what was lost in the tsunami, a nod to the care that the people in the
photos would have put into showing their mementoes and a tribute to the lives they
lived before the disaster.
Takahashi says, “Don’t we all take pictures to unconsciously push back the end of
life we all face eventually? I believe that is why we mostly capture happy moments in
photographs, and that is the past we all want to bring back.”
Though damaged, the photos in “Lost & Found”
suggest the presence of the people who took them.
