Everywhere around us, a landscape of ravage merged with ocean and sky to present shockingly photogenic scenes. Every modern and postmodern aesthetic, together with memories of the greatest literature, art and cinema, could be found or invoked in what we saw, in the quality of air and light, in the sounds and the silence, and in the emotions we felt or tried to imagine. A photographer could come here, and at the end of a single day’s shooting have enough pictures for the most spectacular photobook – like Robert Polidori or Mitch Epstein’s photographs of New Orleans after Katrina. Yet, what Lieko showed us and talked about demanded another order of engagement. It asked for a constant readjustment and refinement of judgment, in which the power of feeling and recall becomes inseparable from the ethical, the practical and the aesthetic.
Aveek Sen, “The Resistant Photograph: A Day with Lieko Shiga” 1
This paragraph alone contains more insight about photography after 3/11 than any other entire piece of writing I’ve seen. The rest of the article is also excellent, showing why Shiga’s upcoming Sendai show 2 could be an important one.
Aveek Sen’s posts for the Fotomuseum blog 3 are also worth a look.