In Japan’s Rubble, Fragments of Lives Past

There are many shots of the devastation happening in post earthquake and tsunami Japan right now but Ko Sasaki’s Series “In Japan’s Rubble, Fragments of Lives Past” brings to light that everything, including memories, can also be swept away by disaster. The images confront us with the physical aftermath of shattered homes and lives. Crushed to bits of ruble, the scattered fragments of people’s pasts lay littering the land. Sasaki’s main focus in the series was to highlight the pictures and snapshots from the lives lost that he found now spread throughout this wreckage.

The photograph shows a meticulously laid out photo album laying open, each photo affixed with a hand labeled caption. However, the pages are soiled with dirt and it lies on the ground pinned under wood, trash, and other rubble. Wooden fragments occupy much of the space within the photograph and in a way frame the picture making it feel very constrained and cluttered. Everything is brown and sullied except for the blue page of the book which stands opposite from the page with the photos. Its bright color keeps drawing the eye back to it making it almost more important than the photos to its opposite. This sea of blue severs as a reminder of the water, which overtook these people and then, in a sense, also became more important than the people.

Generally, pictures are put into albums so they can be cherished and remain undamaged. However, the wooden “x” formed over the album servers as a stamp, marking the book as void. These tangible memory fragments have been stripped from the family and irreparably damaged. As an inanimate victim, the album now stands to directly illustrate the lives that were lost. In its images we can find the humanity within the devastation and the few traces of life that remain, and in that we can relate to the loss.

Any and all semblances of life as it was, were swept away and Sasaki’s photographs highlight this by emphasizing the small and simple, and in doing so giving a much larger depiction. These small pictures are just pieces of monumental memories, the albums a material version of a person’s whole lifetime. The series as a whole can be summarized within one image, but the more of them you see the stronger the human connection is built. Seeing the photos of new babies, weddings, and laughing children, it becomes abundantly clear the sheer number of people effected by this travesty. The rest of Ko Sasaki’s can be found on the New York Times Lens Blog.