shashasha

“The individual photographs in this collection do not illustrate an automatic path from disaster to recovery, but rather push against the falsities, one by one, that surround such paths and the frequent attempts to depict them. For Sasaoka, only the world after the fact remains lingering momentarily, a world of landscape suspended in midair and offering no promise of a path to anywhere, most of its bones having been crushed and washed away.”
― from Shino Kuraishi’s essay “In the World After: The Thought and Photography of Keiko Sasoka”

Japanese photographer Keiko Sasaoka began chronicling the post-disaster landscape in Japan’s Tohoku region shortly after the triple catastrophe of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown hit in March 2011. During many visits over the next four years, she documented the initial absence of familiar sights and scenes in the Tohoku landscape and the gradual transition that followed this moment in time when all sense of balance had disappeared. The 124 photographs in the photobook “Remembrance: Sanriku, Fukushima, 2011-2014” form the “totality of landscape, a totality that lives through an endless expansion of images never represented by or reducible to a single photograph, much less an individual person or isolated object” (from Kuraishi’s essay).

“The actual sight of the disaster area was different from the impression I had formed in seeing it over and over again in the media. Images of possible photographs ran through my mind. In all my time taking photographs, never once had I captured something like what I saw there, nor had I ever hoped to.”
― from Keiko Sasaoka

All texts included in Japanese and English translation.