Otsuchi Future Memories

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Otsuchi Future Memories

The question I arrived with was about memory — and whether photography could help repair it.

I traveled to Otsuchi in October 2012 with my five-month-old daughter. There were almost no babies left in the town — families with young children had left after the disaster. People would ask to hold her, to give her a kiss. In the middle of that desolation, her presence opened doors.

What I found were mountains of debris dotted with red flags where bodies had been discovered. I decided to photograph in black and white — because I thought: this is extremely sad, there are no colors left here. I invited survivors to return to the exact places where their homes and workplaces had once stood, and asked them to remain still and silent in the darkness while I photographed them at night.

At the end of that first trip, I found a family photo album lying in the street. It had been there for eighteen months without anyone picking it up. It was soaking wet, heavy, and smelled like a dead animal. Inside, the colors from the photographs had bled and mixed together — vivid, improbable, luminous. I photographed it without thinking and went home.

Back in Buenos Aires, my own life began to fall apart. The project went on hold. Months later, looking through the work again, the image of the album reappeared. This time I saw it differently — it looked like a painter's palette. I took the dominant colors from the album — colors created by the force of the tsunami — and used them to tint my black-and-white portraits of the survivors. Color as a bridge between their photographs and mine. Between their past and my present.

I returned to Otsuchi four more times over two years. I worked with a local NGO that had archived thousands of recovered family photographs, re-photographing over four hundred images and pairing them with my portraits — connected by color, composition and subject. The images of the water-damaged albums became the color palette of the living.

— Alejandro.

Technical Sheet

Years: 2012–2014 · 6 trips · Location: Otsuchi, Iwate Prefecture, Japan

Large format 4x5 · Moonlight, streetlights, flashlights

Black-and-white negatives, hand-tinted in post-production

Color palette sourced from tsunami-damaged family photographs

Critical Texts

Daido Moriyama — introduction to Otsuchi Future Memories (Editorial RM, 2015):

"The large number of color images taken obsessively by the Argentine photographer Alejandro Chaskielberg constitute a remarkable record, the finest I have so far seen on the subject of the Great Earthquake. At the crossroads of the photographed moment, past, present, and future configure an eternal spiral, which transmits genuine memories to those of us who look at the images."

Rodrigo Orrantia, art historian and photography curator, London — Photobookstore Magazine, 2016:

"Very few projects I've seen lately manage to marry concept and medium in such a startling way. For me not only is Otsuchi Future Memories one of the best books of the last few years, but perhaps of the current decade."

Erik Vroons — GUP Magazine, Netherlands:

"Otsuchi Future Memories pinpoints a blend of the once-captured and the currently vanished — confirming the rehabilitation of the location's distinctive atmosphere, its genius loci."

National Geographic, February 2016:

"A work that reaches across time and which references photography's significance in the formation of identity, family and community histories, and collective memory."

Selected Exhibitions

2014 · Daegu Photo Biennial — South Korea, curated by Alejandro Castellote

2014 · The Fence / Photoville — Brooklyn, Atlanta, Boston, USA

2015 · Sony Gallery Ginza, Tokyo, Japan

2015 · CDF Centro de Fotografía, Montevideo, Uruguay

2015 · Tokyo International Photography Festival, Japan

2015 · Cortona on the Move, Italy

2016 · World Humanitarian Summit, Istanbul — United Nations, 55 Heads of State and Government

2016 · Athens Photo Festival, Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece

2016 · Otsuchi Gauken Junior School, Otsuchi, Japan

2018 · Gachi Prieto Gallery, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Awards & Recognition