Art Review

Lost & Found: Photographs in the Aftermath of East Japan

By Christian L. Frock | Oct 20, 2012

First there was the earthquake, stronger than any in more than 140 years. An oft-repeated video in the media showed alarmed members of Japanese Parliament scrambling up from chairs, the dawning realization of disaster written on their faces. The ocean's reply came within the hour: a surging tsunami that swept up the landscape in one slow, surreal motion. Boats were pushed across land, as buildings and cars rolled on a torrent of unyielding devastation. Videos showed that much of East Japan's coast had been obliterated. Everything you saw, you saw at a remove, safe and dry thousands of miles away. The entire Pacific Rim, from Alaska to Chile, was placed on tsunami warning, but your shores remained calm. Living as you do in a part of the country known for earthquakes, you watched the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami with the understanding that this could happen in your own life. You wondered how they would begin to rebuild their lives.

Historically, the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake was the most powerful ever known to hit Japan and one of the five strongest quakes in the world on record with a magnitude of 9. The earthquake triggered a tsunami that reached heights of more than 130 feet in some places. As of September 2012, a Japanese National Police Agency report confirmed 15,870 deaths, 6,114 injured, and 2,814 people missing across twenty prefectures. The same report accounts for 129,225 buildings totally collapsed, with a further 254,204 buildings 'half collapsed,' and another 691,766 buildings partially damaged. At the time of the crisis, 4.4 million households in northeastern Japan were left without electricity and 1.5 million without water. Three reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant complex were compromised by level 7 meltdowns and raised concerns about radiation exposure worldwide.

Installation view, (re)collection at Intersection for the Arts; photo: Scott Chernis

After the chaos, people in the city of Yamamoto began to spontaneously collect lost photographs found in the sweeping debris of the disaster. A former gymnasium was repurposed as a central collection site for thousands of waterlogged photographs, many damaged beyond general recognition. Within a short time, people began to sort through more than 750,000 found photographs to clean and digitize them in the hope of returning them to the families who lost them, under the auspices of the Memory Salvage Project. From these efforts, a secondary archive of images damaged beyond restoration formed as the Lost & Found Project. While the former recognizes the emotional value of returning keepsakes to people trying to reconstruct their lives, the later recognizes the value of the destroyed photographs as a social document. The Lost & Found Project can be interpreted simultaneously as a traveling memorial for those who perished and a monument to the survivors who gathered lost photos.

With the group exhibition (re)collection, Intersection for the Arts commissioned new works by seven artists in response to the Lost & Found Project. An installation of some 3,500 of these photographs dwarfs gallery visitors. New works by Mark Baugh-Sasaki, Ariel Goldberg, Mayumi Hamanaka, Taro Hattori, Sean McFarland, Kari Orvik and Kelli Yon feature throughout the space. Though photography plays a primary role in each artist's practice, each chose to address the archive with subtly different tactics.

Installation view, (re)collection at Intersection for the Arts; photo: Scott Chernis

When you enter the gallery the found photos command your gaze. You come to the commissions only after you have scanned the images from the Lost & Found project. You know based on the scale of the devastation that some of these people will have perished and that those remaining will have seen their lives painfully altered. The implicit narrative of these photographs confers solemnity in the gallery. You are struck by the survivor's impulse to begin picking up pieces -- here, other people's family photos -- to immediately begin the impossible task of renewal.

Family photo discovered in the debris left over from the 3.11 East Japan tsunami; courtesy Lost and Found.

Several of the photos are still gritty with sand. Many give visual language to a shared sense of the quotidian. Though you can't clearly make out faces, you are able to piece together recognizable scenes from everyday life. In one, a bride in traditional tsunokakushi and swathed in white, stares out from the image. Flanked by men on either side -- their visages reduced to imposing black forms -- she sits calmly, looking directly into the lens and your own eyes by extension. Every possible defining characteristic has been lost to peculiar chemical responses; only her gaze is clearly visible. An iconic stain is consistent across most of the images: deep ochre ooze combined with bacterial green and, in some places, obliterating white where the image essentially washed away. Did she perish in the wake of the tsunami, you wonder. You want to believe she survived and every set of eyes in every picture makes you think this. The next image shows bits and pieces of a young mother, laughing while trying to contain a scrambling baby. A window in the background frames still trees against the sky. No wind that day. No hint that sky and sea might ever churn together so violently. Without realizing it, you weave a narrative for these uncaptioned images from your own memories. You are struck with profound sorrow by an image of two children, about the same ages as your own, sitting side-by-side on a bench innocently eating ice cream. Words can't begin to convey what is captured and what is lost -- it can only be felt somehow with the reserves of your own memories. Intersection for the Arts program director Kevin B. Chen shared that he often broke down while looking at the photos and you understand why.

Taro Hattori, Everything I Could Lose (video still), 2012; courtesy Intersection for the Arts.

In a statement about his work, Oakland-based Taro Hattori notes how casually the word 'everything' is used in daily language and spoke of the difficulty of creating work in response to a disaster in which many people truly lost everything. In a forty-five minute looping silent video compiled from digital stills, displayed on a modest flat screen, Hattori documents "everything I could lose at any moment." In the video, Everything I Could Lose (2012), his possessions are systematically photographed against a plain wood grained table, from mundane correspondence to old paperbacks to mismatched dishes to clothing. Without input from Hattori, you are left to wonder which things he loves and which things he would replace without much consideration. A pair of decorative chopsticks flashes on the screen before a worn set of five. Was the first set a gift? Was the second set passed on from family? You don't know. Like the images in the Lost & Found Project, it is impossible to know which items hold emotional value and which were simply domestic surplus. In the wake of disaster, everything becomes intrinsically valuable because it embodies before and after; before when everything was normal and after when everything changed. The steady flow of Hattori's images prompts you to ask, when everything is lost, where do you begin to grieve? You are troubled by the repetition of objects -- surely none of these things would matter in the face of losing people and in thinking about this, you grasp the double entendre in the title.

Family photo discovered in the debris left over from the 3.11 East Japan tsunami; courtesy Lost and Found.

Brooklyn-based Ariel Goldberg's Chemicals in Reverse (2012) is a take-away broadsheet that illustrates a narrative response to the found photos. With black text organized in simple columns against gray paper, it reads like a stream of consciousness, combining emotional responses to the condition of the photos with observations about the materiality of photographs. A section reads:

"There is a cache of photos that is mostly dormant, living inside our brains, and it communicates, yearns maybe, for emptiness. I don't know if the empty album is like a cathartic landfill, I don't know if it is a relief, or a reminder or redundancy."

"Then there are the photos that refuse to go away, the ones that are mutated and drifting outside of an album."

Chemicals in Reverse addresses our sense of responsibility to the photograph as stewards of our own histories and the common dilemma of any archivist when confronted with flawed images, damaged prints or duplicates. How do you dispose of photographs, really? Even flawed ones -- say, where the subject's eyes are closed or the flash too bright -- convey so much about that moment. This conundrum, in essence, is why the archive exists. You anticipate that Goldberg's observations echo the dialogue that ensued over the soggy photos collected after the tsunami. Ultimately, Chemicals in Reverse asks the same questions that the Lost & Found Project asks: Which images are of value? Who decides? If value is subjective and the owner is absent, photography has historical significance beyond the personal, driven by emotionally unwieldy collective impact.

Mark Baugh-Sasaki, Erosion No. 2, 2012; courtesy of Intersection for the Arts

San Francisco-based Mark Baugh-Sasaki's Erosion No. 2 (2012) is a large-scale video installation. Selected Lost & Found Project photographs are presented on hundreds of wall-mounted horizontal pedestals of varying depths. With this work Baugh-Sasaki focuses on the photographs essentially wiped clean of images. The surfaces resemble reductive white on white abstractions. Forty-one different pairs of still and moving images created from scans of 900 obliterated photographs are selectively projected onto the white surfaces of destroyed photos. Is it an attempt to reconstruct the images from complete destruction? The overlapping images reflect the layered complexity of memories, shuffled as they are without chronology. The flickering transitions of the projections, absent of audio, offer a space for pensive consideration. You imagine that each of the artists spent a significant amount of time contemplating their work in silence, just as you do now.

While it is challenging to imagine how we might respond in a crisis, we also can't anticipate the moments of grace to follow. Some of the most touching examples of humanity are often born from disaster. Comprised of hundreds of volunteers, the Memory Salvage Project restored and returned more than 220,000 photographs to the people who lost them. Traveling exhibitions of the thousands of destroyed photographs create a visceral sense of the scale of devastation in East Japan. The Lost & Found Project paradoxically challenges us to consider what remains of a photograph after the image is gone. These destroyed images offer a visceral sense of the destruction that preceded their painstaking renewal. A humbling sense of human tenacity for life and love, even in nature's aftermath, is what you gather.

(re)collection is on view at Intersection for the Arts through October 27, 2012. For more information, visit theintersection.org. For information about the Lost & Found Project, visit lostandfound311.jp/en/.

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