Iizawa Kotaro: Japanese Photography After 3.11

Overview

The burgeoning socio-environmental issues as a result of increasingly frequent and intense natural disasters in recent years has fuelled many contemporary practices and discourse worldwide. On 11 March, 2011, an earthquake of 9.0 magnitude took place off the Pacific coast of Tohoku region, northeastern Japan, causing over 20,000 deaths and thousands still reported missing. Deeply shook by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, many Japanese photographers took on new image-making ideologies and approaches as a result.

Through the works of Hishida Yusuke, Kazuma Obaru, Tashiro Kazutomo, Hatakeyama Naoya, Shiga Lieko, Arai Takashi and participants of the group exhibition “In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11”, we will explore the recent developments in Japanese photography and look into how our neighbouring country and its new generation of image-makers respond to the devastating events and their irreversible impacts through photography.