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Since the tsunami and the nuclear catastrophe of March 2011, Carlos Ayesta and Guillaume Bression have made regular visits to the region of Fukushima, and especially to the “no man’s land” around the stricken power station.

The fruit of their numerous visits is five series of strongly aesthetic photographs which mix posed situations with a documentary approach. Offbeat photos, which stimulate thought at the consequences of a nuclear accident on such a scale.

What remains in a region where 80.000 people were evacuated from one day to the next? –“Clair-obscur”

How do you live with a menace that is as invisible and poorly documented as radioactivity? – “Bad dreams”

How does nature make its mark on every building, every thing, as time goes by? – “Nature”

How have abandoned objects become the relics of a modern Pompeii? “Packshots”

And finally, what do the former residents think about going back to their ghost towns?

For the last series, called “Retracing our steps”, they asked former residents – sometimes the owners – to come back to their shop or their school, to open the door of those places that were so ordinary before. They also invited some of the residents of Fukushima region to go with them to this zone where entry is now forbidden.  A way for them to see for themselves the impact of the disaster.

In front of the camera, however, they are invited to act as if nothing had happened, and to behave normally.  The normal and the strange intermingle in these almost surreal yet plausible photographs, the sequel of a historically important nuclear accident.

Ayesta and Bression seek to only record the consequences of a massive and durable evacuation, at least for the towns closest to the power station.   Theirs is not the work of activists.