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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. Captions : 1- Midori Ito poses in an abandoned supermarket in the Namie forbidden area. Here, nothing has changed since the disaster, the stock is still there, frozen in time. You can even read on the sign, in Japanese, “Fresh products”. Just after the catastrophe, Midori Ito was evacuated due to fears about the health risks linked to radioactivity. Finally she has come back to live in the town of Koriyama, roughly sixty kilometres from the power station.2- The anti-surge wall in Odaka was completed washed away by the tsunami. The sea water that came over it has created artificial salt lakes.3- “The blue house behind a wall of plastic”
This photograph was taken in the evacuated town of Namie, around ten kilometres from the power station. Seriously damaged by the earthquake, the houses continue to fall apart with each new aftershock. Today, the town is cut in two according to the difference levels of radioactivity present.4- Tomioka-machi, Futaba District, Fukushima Prefecture – Japan5- Hiroyuki Igari lives in Iwaki where he and his wife run a café. Many of his friends were evacuated from the forbidden zone. He poses here in the abandoned restaurant of one of his friends. This restaurant is one kilometre from the coast and ten kilometres from the power station.6- “I think that decontamination doesn’t make any sense because nobody will come back here anyway. In any case, among all my friends, nobody is thinking about it. Only the men are saying they’ll come back but us women, we know this is how it is.”