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A photographic record of the volunteers who saved countless family photo albums after the 2011 Tohoku disaster

Traveling to the Tohoku region a month after the tsunami and nuclear power plant catastrophe on March 11, 2011, photographer Masashi Asada and editor Satoshi Fujimoto met a group of volunteers working to recover family albums and images found in the remains and ruins left behind by the tsunami. “Album no Chikara” (lit. “The Power of Albums”) offers an extensive documentation of the project. Asada and Fujimoto spent two years covering the area, sharing their knowledge about cleaning photos and recording the volunteers’ activities in images. This book is not merely a record of the recovery process after the earthquake and tsunami, but also a rumination on the meaning of irreplaceable photo albums.
This extended edition adds coverage of a similar project that took place in Okayama Prefecture following devastating rainstorms in 2018.

While the book covers the two projects extensively through photographs, please note that a majority of context and information is provided through Japanese text.