A Stark Photo Series of the Aftermath of Japan's Tōhoku Earthquake
Mizuhama, Prefectura Miyagi.

FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

A Stark Photo Series of the Aftermath of Japan's Tōhoku Earthquake

German photographer Hans-Christian Schink is now showing his series, shot a year after the devastating disaster.

He has photographed subway stations across North Korea in 1989, gotten lost in Vietnamese jungles, shot glaciers in Antarctica, and done a series on Leipzig swimming pools. Now, the German photographer Hans-Christian Schink is showing his photos of Tōhoku, the region on Japan's east coast that was ravaged by the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

It was only earlier this year that a report confirmed that the quake caused over 15,000 deaths and roughly 400,000 buildings to fully or "half" collapse. Initial estimates from the World Bank put the cost at $245 billion, while the Japanese government's estimate was about $60 billion higher; in either case, the event was one of the most destructive natural disasters in recent history.

Advertisement

With that in mind, Schink visited Tōhoku in 2012 to shoot the region a year after the disaster, but he didn't want to simply focus on images of mayhem and destruction. "You won't see chaos in my images from Tōhoku," said the artist, whose Tōhoku photo series is on show at the Alfred Erhardt Foundation in Berlin until Sunday.

Ogatsucho Ohama.

Like his other series, everything often has a still, post-apocalyptic feel. "I'm fascinated by the atmosphere of stillness," he said. "Maybe that's why I try to find it in every place I go."

At first, Schink landed in Japan on a three-month artist residency in Kyoto, which was marking the first anniversary of the disaster. It wasn't his initial plan to head over to the disaster site, but it was inevitable. "Everyone I spoke to encouraged me to go there and see with my own eyes," he said.

He said it was "impossible to imagine the dimension of devastation" along the 300-mile-long coastline struck by the tsunami, in which the storm surge flushed up to five miles inland.

The earthquake and tsunami produced an estimated 25 million tons of debris, and while cleanup efforts were projected to take three years, the rebuilding effort is still ongoing. "It will take for sure more than three years. It's not only a question of cleaning up, but in many places a question of whether towns and villages should be rebuilt again or not," Schink said.

Tanogashira, Utatsu, Miyagi Prefecture.

Advertisement

Naturally, the scale of the destruction is evident in Schink's work, which shows the overwhelming power of nature in the aftermath of disaster. In his series, we see broken concrete slabs washed up on the shore like cookie crumbs, or houses squished against each other like crowded teeth. That's not to mention the snowy silence captured with the gaping holes of where tons of buildings once stood.

But even in 2012, when the series was shot, resilience was a key theme. "I think people will settle there again," he said. "It gives you an idea of the state of mind when you hear somebody saying, 'My family didn't leave our village in the hunger crisis of 1732, why should we leave now?' But this persistence also gives me a very ambiguous feeling and maybe that's something I wanted to show too."

Kesennuma, Hajikamiiwalsaki.

Schink first visited Japan in 2005, developing a strong relationship to the country. One thing that fascinated him, he said, was stoic way the populace at large appeared to view natural disasters. But in light of the other disaster following the Tōhoku quake—the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown—that view is changing.

"What's really changing is the way people see man-made disasters like Fukushima, they're realizing that they allowed politics to be completely influenced by the nuclear industry lobby," said Schink. "It will be interesting to see if that can be changed."