I came across the following article by Samatha Clark on the NPR website the other day – “10 Years Later, The Rescued Snapshots Damaged In Japan’s Tsunami”¹.

The article recalls the devastating earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 that struck the coast of Japan following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster. Around 20,000 were killed and half a million people were forced from their homes. Her article though is about a project called Lost and Found Project by Japanese photographer Munemasa Takahashi which grew out of an earlier project called Memory Salvage. The aim of this project had been to collect and preserve hundreds of thousands of family photographs that were scattered amongst the debris of the tsunami, in an attempt to return them to their previous owners. This was an important project in its own right, underlying the importance of photographs in preserving memory and moments in cherished lives. As Clark says: “

“Together, these images chronicle not just family history but the momentous and mundane moments of everyday life that were deemed important enough to document. We make and keep family photographs, one of the most important genres of the medium, as a way to remember and define who we are. For families rebuilding their lives after the tsunami, these kinds of images hold a special meaning”¹.

The purpose of the Lost and Found Project was to take the images and create from them a memorial to reflect the emotional trauma unleashed by the effects of the tsunami. By bringing the images together, Takahashi underlines the poignancy not of momentous events in themselves, but of the everyday events in people’s lives that they once chose to record as personal memories and are now preserved as a collective memory to be shared by survivors and the public alike.

Reflecting on the general disdain with which the ubiquity of social media photography is greeted these days, it is worth remembering that there is still huge value in the capacity of images to record important events in people’s lives, particularly when those lives may be suddenly and unexpectedly lost. As Nathan Jorgenson says in The Social Photo, “The social photo’s central importance is the degree to which the image’s frame, the media object itself, has dissolved away, leaving behind the substance of life and experience”².

But it is also good to see a very human side to photography and its ability to preserve memory. I have a large collection of old family photos from the 1920’s and 30’s which previously I might have left in a cardboard box unseen. But this project is a good reminder that those photos represent moments in people’s lives that they chose to record themselves and it would be a very worthwhile project to bring them back to life in an organised archive, even if only as a recollection of family history for future generations.

Images from the family archive.

Notes:

1) Samatha Clark is a writer and photo editor based in Washington D.C. Her full article can be found on the NPR website  https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2021/03/10/973020150/10-years-later-the-rescued-snapshots-damaged-in-japans-tsunami?t=1616955605404.

2) Jurgenson, N. (2020) The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media.  London: Verso, pp24.