Recently, this blog has been receiving a little bit less attention than normal, as the pull of Twitter grows stronger. It’s deceptively easy to forget that some people not only read Street Level Japan, but have opinions about what’s written here! Among the different types of responses to this blog, the most satisfying might be to receive a comment that not only disagrees with a post, but shows conclusively that it’s incorrect.
This recently happened with the work of Stephen Vaughan, a British photographer about whom I wrote a couple of posts in March. Stephen was in Japan on March 11, working on a long-term project about, of all things, the possibility of a major earthquake. Based on some second-hand information, I wrote a post expressing some disappointment that he had (allegedly) been discouraged by the earthquake, and effectively stopped shooting the project. This is absolutely not the case.
In reality, Stephen traveled to areas in Iwate to photograph the damage caused by the tsunami, as well as an evacuation center. In his own words:
The work that I made in Iwate was driven by a responsibility to bear witness to what had happened. I was totally committed to recording and documenting what I saw with as much depth and clarity as I was able. I am not a photo-journalist in the classic sense (I work with large-format cameras) and there were many other photographers making those kinds of pictures. Instead, I continued to use the visual language that I had established in the project so far, in which the emphasis is on a stilled and descriptive clarity and simplicity.
Some of Stephen’s photographs from Iwate, as well as earlier photographs from this series, can be seen on his website. In my mind, it’s still too early to consider a large body of work on the earthquake, but with time, “A Catfish Sleeps” certainly has the potential to be one of the definitive photographic documents of this disaster. I just hope that the project hasn’t ended.
Update: Stephen says: “I definitely intend to go back to Iwate and Tokyo at some stage, to continue the project. I don’t yet know what form this will take but I won’t be seeking a simple resolution to what has happened.” Also, he’s kindly allowed me to post this link to a 140-page dummy version of “A Catfish Sleeps” on Issu. Definitely worth a look.
Hi Dan,
Thanks for posting these images.
I left Japan two days before the earthquake and came back two months after. So, I was not there, and I do not know what I would have done if I were there.
Having said that, I personally feel that photography is very limited in terms of telling stories like this. This is what I felt when I traveled in Miyagi this May.
To me by focusing on the destruction (which individual photographers seem to do at large) or the “entirety of the event” (which Youtube video of Tsunami surely did as well as poor photographers for Japanese media), these images really obscure stories that happened to individuals. As a viewer, you go like “wow, I cannot believe this actually happened,” and you move to a next story on front page.
It clearly needs further investigations and, more importantly, creative ways to tell stories like this in 21st century in my opinion.
It needs to tell what it was like to be there when you just lost four family members on the first floor while you and your teenage daughters survived on 2nd floor. Or what was it like to walk for miles in the water not knowing how long this hell goes on, and you only realized that normal life goes on on the other side of your town.
These stories are really complex and very personal. I just do not know if still images in a conventional manner can handle them. Maybe I need to look harder, but I just have not come across anything like this yet.
I hope some people with a creative mind can come up with ways to tell stories like these.
Warmly,
Tsuyoshi