Three years ago this week, Japan was ravaged by a 9.0 earthquake, the largest on record in the country’s history.
The Argentine photographer Alejandro Chaskielberg visited Otsuchi earlier this year to photograph the wreckage that remains. With the help of a Japanese curator, he asked residents who had been displaced by the tsunami to pose, at night, in the ruins of their old homes. Chaskielberg told me that his extended exposures—most were several minutes long—gave the shoot a ritualistic character. “For me, there was something sacred of being in silence with the subjects in the exact point where their homes once stood,” he said.
