Visual Culture Blog

AP Photo/Sergey Ponomarev

It is a simple, yet a strikingly powerful image: a woman looks at family photographs found in the rubble of the devastating earthquake and tsunami. The photographs have been meticulously cleaned and left to dry on clothing pegs in a school gymnasium in the town of Natori, Miyagi prefecture. Survivors are given the opportunity to look at the photographs on display in the hope of identifying friends and family members. In some cases, the photograph will be the only thing that is left behind.

AP Photo/Sergey Ponomarev

Another photograph by the Russian press photographer Sergey Ponomarev depicts the sheer scale of the collection of photographs, and, by extension, the sheer scale of the disaster. A man is looking at an old family album, so enthralled in the images that he appears to be unaware of the very camera depicting him in the process of looking. In the background, several people can be seen doing exactly the same, sometimes in groups or as individual, trying to come to terms with the images laid out in front of them.

Ponomarev’s photographs are indicative of the complex and troubled relationship between photography and death. In his classic book Camera Lucida, the French semiotician Roland Barthes sought to overcome the death of his mother as he analyzes, over and over again, a photograph of her. In one of his most famous quotes, he writes ‘death is the eidos of photography’. In other words, photography operates on the idea that the photograph will, eventually, outlive the subject photographed. It is this tragic and perverse dichotomy between an inanimate and dead object (the photograph) and the sense of a person liveliness in a photograph – a liveliness particularly apparent in family photographs.

Anonymous, a butsudan in a traditional Japanese household

Apart from referring to an universally applicable attribute of photography, the hope to find photographs from deceased friends and family members in the school gymnasium of Natori also displays a culturally specific phenomenon. Similar to other Asian cultures such as China and Korea, funerals are usually accompanied by a formal portrait with black rope on the top corners of the image. These photographs of the deceased constitute a crucial aspect in the process of mourning: they are later displayed on or above small Bhuddist shrines (butsudan) kept in most traditional Japanese households. In the school gymnasium of Natori, the survivors’ search for a photograph of family and friends is partially motivated by a spiritual process that subscribes great value to the photographic likeliness of a person.

AP Photo/Vincent Yu

In contrast to the sterile and composed black and white portraits associated with the funeral procession and the butsudan, the photographs on display in the school gymnasium represent moments of vivacity and liveliness – moments traditionally perceived as worthy of photographic representation. An image by Hong Kong born photographer Vincent Yu can be read as a collage representing significant life stages: amongst several photographs of new-born babies, there are photographs of weddings, sports days, school groups and holidays. In sum, they are the kind of photographs that represent a lived experience, that situate the subject within a community, that communicate what it means to be human.

As the family photographs in the school gymnasium continue to dry on clothing pegs, those who survived are coming to terms with the discrepancy between the tragic loss of human life and the happiness encountered in the image. The press photographs depicting family photographs are thus deeply self-referential: they are photographs about the very materiality of photography, the collective memories produced by photographs and the photograph, perhaps, constituting a source of comfort.

If you are interested in Japanese photography, please download my essay:
Marco Bohr (2011). ‘Are-Bure-Boke: Distortions in Late 1960s Japanese Cinema and Photography’. Dandelion Journal. Vol. 2, No. 2.

Shortly after the devastating earthquake and ensuing Tsunami hit the north-eastern coast of Japan, the Japanese Prime Minister Kaoto Kan addressed the assembled press in Tokyo with a brief statement expressing his sympathies to those affected by the disaster. In his short statement, Kan alludes to a deeply harbored anxiety in Japanese culture as he says the following:

“Some of the nuclear power plants in the region have automatically shut down, but there is no leakage of radioactive materials to the environment.”

This message might come to haunt Kan as conflicting news is already emerging from a nuclear power plant in Fukushima. Perhaps to avoid a panic, Kan seeks to quell the anxiety of a nuclear disaster that operates very powerfully in the only country on Earth to have suffered the explosion of an atomic bomb. Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fears caused by this nuclear trauma are an important part of Japanese visual culture.

Akira Kurosawa, Dreams, 1990

Fictional representations of a nuclear apocalypse – now eerily reminiscent of the actual news footage emerging from the disaster zone – are a constant theme in Japanese cinema and anime. The eminent director Akira Kurosawa for instance, in his portrayal of a bizarre collection of dreamscapes, depicts Mount Fuji (an ideological symbol for the nation) surrounded by explosions and steeped in the colour red. The protagonist in Dreams (1990) wonders if there was an earthquake. No, far worse he is told, Japan was struck by a nuclear disaster.

Tokyo after ‘Third Impact’ in Neon Genesis Evangelion, 1995

Kurosawa’s post-apocalyptic vision is similarly evoked in the classic anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion by the director Hideaki Anno. The young boy protagonist ventures through a deserted Tokyo struck by a massive disaster referred to in the series as ‘Third Impact’. If the Kanto earthquake from 1923 represents the first impact, and the Allied firebombs in 1944/45 represent the second impact, the ‘Third Impact’ in Neon Genesis Evangelion refers to an event that is yet to come. First screened in 1995, Neon Genesis Evangelion stirred a deeply felt anxiety amongst Japan’s youth that the world would come to an end in the year 2000. This was partially related to the global fears of the Y2K computer virus and the popularity of Nostradamus’s predictions amongst followers of new religions.

Neon Genesis Evengelion, Episode 1, 1995

However, rather then seeking a reductive explanation for a complex set of causalities, I believe that post-apocalyptic visions in Japanese visual culture are the state’s equivalent to a psychoanalytical condition: post-traumatic stress syndrome. The disasters and ‘Third impacts’ in fictional Japanese visual culture can never be entirely disassociated with the actual experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The most famous example for the relationship between nuclear fears and Japanese visual culture remains to be the iconic Godzilla movie. First screened in 1954, in the film Godzilla was created following a nuclear detonations and acts as a powerful metaphor for nuclear weapons. Godzilla must be considered in the aftermath of Hiroshima, but also, the continued testing of nuclear weapons on the Bikini atoll from 1946 to 1958 by the Americans. In other words, Godzilla is the fictional manifestation of global arms race that was yet to peak at the height of the cold war.

Godzilla, 1954

There is no question, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan are a natural disaster. Yet the possibility of a nuclear meltdown or atomic ground zero is created by man. It is this dichotomy between man and nature that the Prime Minister of Japan maybe inadvertently evoked in his speech to the press. Man cannot control nature, but neither should an ever growing risk of a nuclear disaster control man. If the many references of a nuclear apocalypse in Japanese visual culture are anything to go by, the deeply embedded anxieties of a people should have been taken more seriously.

If you are interested in Japanese photography, please download my essay:
Marco Bohr (2011). ‘Are-Bure-Boke: Distortions in Late 1960s Japanese Cinema and Photography’. Dandelion Journal. Vol. 2, No. 2.