Uma Kinoshita is an independent photographer based in Tokyo. As a self-taught photographer, she started to take photographs in 2004. Her initial interests were in a woman’s body and emotions. With her nude works, she won several awards and held exhibitions at home and abroad.
However, the disasters of March 11, 2011, drastically changed her photography. She turned her eyes, which had been so introspective, to big social issues. In the first year after the disasters, she pursued the absolute loneliness people could experience by taking pictures of places where no one could or should be, and thereby completed a portfolio entitled “Lost in Fukushima.” In the second year, she focused on the role of their local religion as a source of their community resilience and completed her second Fukushima series entitled "Prayer in Stricken Land." In the third and fourth years, she continued to visit Fukushima to complete a black and white portfolio printed on "Kamikawasaki-washi," Japanese hand-screened paper from Fukushima. In this series entitled "In Sorrow and In Silence," she followed the region's slow decay and pointed out the fragility of our control over nature. These three series have been published and exhibited widely at home and abroad and some are in collection of Fukushima Museum.
Taken four years after the Fukushima disasters, these haunting black-and-white images—printed on unique Japanese paper—document the region’s slow decay and point to the fragility of our control over nature.
