Lost and Found takes its title from the memory project organised by Japanese photographer Takahashi Munemasa in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami that hit the Pacific coast of Japan in March 2011. The project works with a vast accumulation of family photographs discovered in the ruins of the city of Yamamoto in the Miyagi prefecture. Damaged, marked or partly obliterated by the effects of water and mud, these snapshots spoke of a vanished world. An installation forming part of this project, a wall of ghosts, opens this exhibition devoted to the ambivalent power of images—images of a world already vanished or yet coming into being, images of a Japan in the grip of omnipresent catastrophe and seized at the same time by an explosive vitality endlessly renewed.
The exhibition draws on the collection of the A Foundation to present a selection of works for the most part by women photographers, too often omitted from canonical accounts of Japanese photography.
Kenji Ishiguro, Hiroshima Now, 1965 - Courtesy of the artist and Fondation A Stichting.