Mighty Silence: Images of Destruction: The Great 2011 Earthquake and Tsunami of East Japan and Fukushima

In these disquieting photographs captured in the wake of the earthquake (which measured 9.0 on the Richter scale) and subsequent tsunami that rocked eastern Japan in 2011—leaving 18,000 dead or missing—photographer Handa, by focusing exclusively on the wreckage, records the bleak reality of the aftermath and, tacitly, the nation’s earliest feelings of shock and helplessness. A Japanese fashion and celebrity photographer whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair and Vogue, Handa toured the devastated region roughly three weeks after the disaster, with a 65 million–pixel camera and a hope that “such photos might serve a purpose someday.” As a result of that digital technology, these somber landscapes of debris are shown in glaring detail, with each broken chair, loose shoe, and smashed plank conveying displacement and privation. Here is a seafood processing plant that has been mangled into abstraction; a train coach that has been tossed among a cemetery’s headstones; as well as ravaged cars, dislodged buildings, and collapsed factories. Although people are conspicuously absent from the photographs, introductory text—by a reporter, a rescue worker, a public official, two scholars, and others—provides much-needed perspective, with firsthand accounts of the disaster and its aftermath. The photographs and text provide a vital document of a tragedy that left scars across the world. (Mar.)