Fukushima Disaster 2011 | Photo -Exhibition Reflection

Here it is clearly visible how “mental realism” is unique for the photo art

The Fabric House, Landskrona photos Exhibition Hall, has completed beautiful and deep windows that frame the explosive greenery – the contrast with regard to the photos indoors is therefore large. Because it’s dead here. Photos that have contact with the dead? In any case felt Suzuki MayumiA Japanese photographer born in 1977, which when she photographed the lens for her father’s large size camera, she touched the kingdom of death.

Mayumi’s father was called Atsushi Sasaki And was also a photographer, and her grandfather too. Perhaps the portrait and photo studio in Onagawa on the Japanese east coast that operated the parents of Mayumi would be inherited for her? But it was washed away when the earthquake in Tōhoku struck in 2011, and the parents of Mayumi became two of the victims who were never found.

I’m sure you remember it The earthquake? A ninth on the Richter scale, the seabed in the Pacific Ocean, burst hundreds of kilometers and a tsunami that was more than thirty meters high over the Japanese east coast in his places. Do you remember the icy feeling when you could follow how the gigantic waves reached the fucushima -core center? Four explosions, three meltdowns and it spread radioactivity in the air, in the ground and in the sea.

It was the first natural disaster – of such dignity – that could be reported in detail while it happened via media on the internet. And now the disaster here, in the fabric house, as a photo art, is displayed in a different way than in the media at that time. Fourteen years have passed. When you are surrounded by the photos in “Reflection” – where seven Japanese photographers have mapped the disaster over the years, it feels as if in 2011 both recently and another time was.

“Testament of the Restoration” is the collective name for Mayumi’s Three Picture Series where she uses what she found after the destruction. 1) Photos taken with the father’s camera lens, excavated from the clay. 2) Photos in children and 3) Negatives of what was once ordinary portrait assignments that the father took in his studio.

The experience of one Photography has an inherent, amazing, risk (or coincidence) to transformation. It is enough to check their family photos; A feeling when the photo was taken, other feelings when the years have expired, depending on what happens. Once Japanese men needed portraits for their resume. In the Studio of Attsushi Sasaki in Onagawa they searched for the goal and now we meet these rotting glances of these men in copies of negative injured by the tsunami in Landskrona.

These looks, on the other side of the earthquake, feel in me and that feeling has the Danish phototheorist Mette Sandbye Called ‘mental realism’. Are photos reality? Yes and no, Sandbye means in the book “Mindesmærker. Time and reindeer in the photo”: the photo is a construction, but it is built up by the reality that the viewer of the photo is aware of.

A kind of super veniens, where the created properties of photography are dependent on the existence with which they were made. The flat and limited photo supervision keeps itself in the world that embodies and if it changes, the experience of photography – the “mental realism” – too. For the individual that stands there and glorious, part of the physical existence is still.

Mental realism is Unique for the photo. Or where? As I said, 2011 feels both recent and another time and another time. Since then, the digital world has increasingly devoured it analogously. Has the photo lost its attachment in the material and therefore the reality connection? No, it’s not possible. Mental realism is the pounding heart of photography, AI images or images that are so manipulated that they no longer make truth are not photos, although some people believe it.

Not because the group is a second whole The reality, it’s a piece that a photographer gives us. As in Saito Daisukes Photos – Pieces over the years, she photographed the destroyed areas of Tsunamin in 2011 and returned to the same places in 2016 and 2021. The photos of Daisuke show that building is simple, but the recreation of Soul is difficult, destroyed at home and the new houses give the feeling of Human Park.

Or take the Obara Kazumas Photos “restart beyond fukushima” – he was the first photographer on the spot in the nuclear power plant and depicted employees who stayed and tried to clean up. “Mental Realism” tells about what fate throws at people, you go to work one day and the next day you run the risk of dying there.

Since 2011 I have become allergic to see what my eyes have not chosen to see. I feel an angel when I am again forced to look at a useless product, something opportunistic or populist, banal or meaningless. That is why it is fun in the fabric house and the small defined photo library – here we have an analog world, here we have time, reality and photography. And not only death but also life; A settlement with the insane troops that lasted so much and at the same time the feeling of the duty of the living – to continue.

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The art of destroying art

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