Lost & Found Project in Japan
Almost three years ago to the day, an earthquake, followed by a tsunami and a nuclear disaster, struck Japan. Images of natural disasters are among the most striking that can occur in reality. But for the survivors and all those directly affected by the tragedy, the impact is more insidious: liquid, like rogue waves,that infiltrates broken families and carries away the missing.
The Lost & Found Project echoes this dialogue between accident and memory. It’s part of the Salvage Memory Project, a citizen initiative led by the photographer Munemasa Takahashi and Kazuto Hoshi a resident of Yamamoto, who organised the recovery of nearly three quarters of the photographs lost in the city of Yamamoto as a result of the tragedy . Washed, digitized and numbered, twenty thousand of the photographs were returned to their owners. Brought together for an exhibition, the images were also turned into a book.
Eaten away by water marks that look like molten metal, scratched and streaked by blinding halation, smeared like gouache or covered in asure and pastel moss, the faces in the Lost & Found Project, surprised at their family reunions or during a Sunday walk, now have the mysterious allure of memory. Aristocrats, in the Diane Arbus sense of the term, who have already lived through the tragedy. We dig through them carefully, as at an excavation site, inevitably alone. What makes the most silent photographs beautiful is how they come to find us, one by one, “when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware.”
More informations: http://www.akaaka.com/publishing/books/bk-lostfound.html
344 x 247 mm
30 euros
Lost & Found project: http://lostandfound311.jp/en/
