In Silence and In Sorrow

I have been taking photographs of Fukushima since the triple disaster hit the prefecture on March 11, 2011. "In Silence and In Sorrow" is the third series of my Fukushima project. It consists of photographs I took in evacuation zones in 2013 and 2014. Some places are located on the coast and that within several kilometers from the exploded nuclear power plant. Others are small mountainous villages. Although they are more than 40 km away from the nuclear power plant, the radioactive particles were carried by wind and fell all over them. After more than 2 years had passed, these zones had slowly but steadily fallen into ruin. In these photographs, we see things and places once beloved by people and now abandoned. I cannot stop myself from feeling the fragility of human existence and eschatological overtones as a result of human arrogance of trying to control the nature, blindly believing in their technologies. I printed these photographs on Japanese traditional hand-screened paper called "Kamikawasaki-washi" from Nihonmatsu, Fukushima Prefecture. It has a history of over 1000 years. I decided to use this special paper, for I expected that a certain kind of reaction might happen between the photographs of Fukushima and the paper of Fukushima. The results were more than I had expected. Every time I print, I get different results with a kind of improvisational nature. With this help. it seems as if the photographs were to talk by themselves.