Looking at Fukushima not easy. The place has been evacuated on 2011 after 4 of its nuclear reactors melted down. Tohuku earthquake raised a 13 tsunami meter wave that was just 3 meters too high for the 10 meter wave gate that the power station had in place. The meltdown reached a level 7 on the International nuclear event scale, which has only been matched by the Chernobyl accident, and never repeated since Fukushima. Photographer Rebecca Lilith Bathory traveled there and came back with unsettling photos that were animated by designer Chris Lavelle. While the photos are extremely beautiful, they also put the viewer at extreme unease. Rebecca told DIYP about the motivation for the trip:
Getting to Fukushima was neither easy nor convenient, it requires hard-to-obtain permits and the travel itself is quite stressful. Nontheles Rebecca travelled with a full kit for the 5 days travel:
Rebecca tells DIYP about the emotional impact that some of the places created: You can see more of Rebecca’s work on her facebook page. For some reason the power was still on in this book store, a computer still turned on, the automatic door covered with cobwebs opened half way and then closed again making an eerie, creepy noise. Until I had realised what it was it had really spooked me out. It began to feel like the disaster had just happened yesterday, time stood still and yet these doors were on repeat over and over again. I walked over a layer of books, they once had value and gave people a livelihood, people once took pleasure in walking those aisles and picking out their favourite titles to read. I felt bad walking all over them to take my photos, as books are such special things and now they just lay here contaminated and decaying, my photographs being their last story to those who view my photos. As I created my last photo, a sudden deafening alarm shot through the building and Arkadiusz came running through the shop saying he had tripped an alarm, we ran to the car and drive away from the site. Only to return an hour or two later to the sound of the alarm still going off. In a place as desolate as this there was no living soul to hear it. We decided to go inside again and turn it off, we found a photo album that contained photographs of employers wearing the same uniforms we saw scattered in the floors. They smiled holding books, standing by the shelves with an array of brand new titles on them. Flicking through this album made me truly sad, for those people could no longer work in that store, they lost their jobs and faced a new life so suddenly away from their homes.
