Tatsuya Yamashita’s photography series “Decontamination,” photographing surfaces of decontamination process site at Fukushima and documenting his own engagement with scrapping sediments as a decontamination process won the 10th “1_WALL” Photography Competition. Yamashita, who originally is interested in archeology and sediments, is searching past memories and revealing time by contacting soils through his photographic work. What made him to pursue the project was the contradiction surrounding the act of decontamination: trying to remove unmovable thing. In the open judging session, the work was highly evaluated as strong expressional work by dealing social issue, yet expressing own anger and thought into personal perspectives.
For this exhibition, Yamashita adds some new photographs from Fukushima, which clearly shows a sense of his physical existence from the sediment surface. In other word, his tiny action gives the viewers so hopeless to realize how much large area is needed to be decontaminated which set as an unsolved issue. Please enjoy Yamashita’s unique perspective seeing through the sediment surfaces how people’s lives and culture have distorted.