I have made many Instagram posts over the years saying that I’d write about my experience when shooting Mochimno between 2016-2018, but have yet to write post any BTS let alone write about my experience and how one project and it’s failings turned into what would evidently become Mochimono, a series of still life images documenting the personal effects of people who were either displaced or died during the Great Tohoku Earthquake of 2011.
As the end of year hard drive merging and clear out begins I was going through some old files I took in 2018 on a trip to Japan, similar region to where I shot my initial project. I’ve always wanted to document the remains of the towns that were left to rot following the melt down at the Daichi Nuclear Power Planet in 2011.
For me the biggest issue was access, transport and potential punishment from the local Japanese authorities. As Japan is somewhere I visit yearly and don’t wish to be bared from visiting. Now that I have the access to a car, I feel that such a project could gain some ground and be a little more realistic, regardless of access.
when I shot Mochimono and even the ground work of the images and experiences I will be discussing here, it was all done on foot. I would travel as far as I possibly could by local means and then walk from there. This way of working had it’s up downs. Being able to go off the beat and track and access places not possible by car were essential to the trip. Where the latter I’d find myself standing in the pouring rain lugging an over filled backpack in the back end of winter in the middle of no where and restricted by bus/train time tables.
It’s nearly 2022 and two years since I’ve been to Japan [due to this pandemic*]. Two years is a long time and even when visiting North Eastern areas during 2016 -2019 I would find that a lot would change. I’d be curious to visit some of the areas that I had previously taken photos and see how different they are, not for a photographic perspective, but just out of curiosity.
Untitled, 2018. An abandoned car in the ‘No Go Zone’.
The key thing here is time, how much has it changed? I know there is still plenty to document, I’m sure of it, but as with the initial ground work of Mochimono, which was going to be a landscape project, I found that upon visiting the areas I researched, they had changed greatly over five years. This is a whole post in itself, so I’ll save that for the long over due post about that series, but to say the least I was ‘disappointed’, if that’s the right word? Long story short it wasn’t aesthetically pleasing and being ground level wasn’t the way to document the now baron areas.
I wish I posted these images at the time of taking them, this is something I’m very bad at. Even now I’m yet to post them on my website, let alone Instagram and other social platforms. I like a handful of images from the time I spend exploring these areas. I find it difficult as visually it was very interesting and as I wasn’t sure what type of images I was intending to create, I would therefore shoot various things, from still life to architectural landscapes.
Looking back, I now know how I’d shoot the project. Maybe it’s the nostalgia of looking back fondly at these images and the days spending just wandering care free, but there is a part of me that wishes to actually get this project off the ground.
Untitled, 2018.
One of two abandoned supermarkets I found on my travels. The smell was revolting, this was likely due to animals finding their way in and having their way with the place, hence all the brown.