Culture

The “Nuclear” Refugees of Fukushima Return to be Photographed at the Place of Destruction

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How much emotion can fit into one picture? Especially when it depicts former residents of Fukushima photographed at the remains of  the ghost – city, five years after the nuclear nightmare…

The nuclear accident in Fukushima in Japan, a result of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit the country is well known to everyone. The number, however, of those who were asked to leave their houses and evacuate all the surrounding areas, which reached 80,000, remains until now an impressive number of forced migration. The French photographers Carlos Ayesta and Guillaume Bression, in their ambitious project entitled “Retracing Our Steps”, asked some of them to return to their roots, and to be photographed there as if life had never stopped. With the only difference that this time, the decor that surrounds them is nothing but the remains of the environment where they lived and worked until 2011…

The preparation lasted four years, it met incredible bureaucratic adversity, but the result justifies them completely. Both artistically and historically.