shashasha

Masato Seto's Cesium-137Cs is the photographer's most recent publication. Focusingon the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster which began on the 11th of March 2011, this photobook was published two years after the nuclear meltdown of three of the plant's six nuclear reactors. Seto's_Cesium-137Cs_is a photographic attempt at making visible the otherwise unseeable presence of the radioactive isotope Caesium within the surrounding environment. Captured inFebruary 2012, a year after the accident, Seto's monochromatic images present a photographic narrative which bends on the illusionary and spectral. Within the pages are stark scenes of rivers and thesurrounding naturedeceptively quiet in its initial appearance, the images are clothed in an absence of the familiar. The overwhelming presence of the uncanny slowly engulf the photographs of streams and plants,turning the black and white photographs into more inverted tones of muted and contrasting accentsof taut silver. The ripples and flowing currentof the streams and rivers are brought alive through the presence of a substance that isinorganic, bending the roots and branches of the surrounding vegetation into structures which consume and engulf in upon themselves. Themutating forms and shadows reference not only the current Fukushima disaster but more subversivelydraws upon Japans'spostwar psyche through the iconic worksfrom photobooks such as Shomei Tomatsu's11.02 Nagasaki(1966) and Kikuji Kawada'sChizu(1965).