There is nothing like a global catastrophe to push art into seeming irrelevance. A painting has never stopped an earthquake from erupting. But art fares well in the remembrance-of-earthquakes department, and “In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11,” an exhibition at the Japan Society, is a model of intelligent memorializing. Bringing together more than 90 works by 17 leading photographers, the show sets out to observe the five-year anniversary of 3-11, which is numerical shorthand for that Friday afternoon in northeastern Japan when an earthquake triggered a series of unimaginable horrors, including nuclear meltdown.
[Click on “Listen” for Solomon’s review of the show with WNYC’s Richard Hake.]
“In the Wake,” as its title suggests, does not seek to take us inside a red-hot instant of devastation. There is nothing here like the 9/11 scenes that New Yorkers know regrettably well – no photographs of rushing firemen or frantic crowds, no close-ups of someone’s missing shoe. Rather, the show explores the eerily quiet aftermath of catastrophe while highlighting the wide range of approaches to story-telling. Some of the photographers go for matter-of fact images that capture what they saw. Others take refuge in fantasy images that only nominally resemble the visible world. After a catastrophe, do you want to see what’s there – or rather to invent something all-new?
The show opens with photographs that favor of a literal, almost documentary style, such as those of Naoya Hatakeyama. A well-known Japanese artist, he lost his elderly mother in the floodwaters. Afterwards, he decided to return to his hometown and photograph all that remains – an abandoned landscape with mangled trees and mounds of rubbish and little trace of the life that once flourished here. “No style” is of course a style of its own, and Hatakeyama’s photographs have a clean and spare beauty, especially one that allows a rainbow to intrude.
On the other extreme, some photographers favor conceptual strategies and digital manipulation. This, I think, is the weaker half of the show. But it does include the dazzling work of Nobuyoshi Araki, a well-known Japanese photographer who decided to stay put in Tokyo on that fateful March 11. He later ripped the negatives of the film he shot that day, and the resulting prints – they variously show a cloud, a rainy street scene, and an actress on television – are defaced by dark slash marks. They turn every print into a “reject” and suggest that perfection – artistic or otherwise – is no longer possible.
