shashasha

Rebekka Deubner shot the photographs in her book “Tempête Après Tempête” in Fukushima Prefecture in the summer of 2019, her second visit to the region. With the area still suffering from the triple catastrophe from March 11, 2011, Deubner used her camera and her sensibilities to create a visual portrait of the lingering invisible aftermaths and explore de- and reconstruction on various levels.

Opening with close-up shots of the beach along Fukushima’s coast (images in which insects, small fish and other animals, seaweed, stones, plants and less identifiable objects form a strange, intriguing, chaotic mess), Deubner moves on to extreme close-ups portraits of people she met in Fukushima who allowed her into their emotional space and shared their anecdotes (“I lost no one. Father, mother, uncle, friends… no one”; “Data can’t relay terror”). Through the course of the book, Deubner comes extremely close to and isolates individual elements usually seen in context with something else. But Deubner is not interested in merely taking things apart, she is not looking for elusive truths. Rather, everything begins to move and merge into new, hybrid forms. Deconstruction as a chance for new things to emerge.

All texts included in French and in English translation

“The scenery I am wandering around is made of water and cells – randomly forming pink-whitish seaweed, shiny epidermis, teeming caves, narrow pupils, raven hair. Shamelessly I’m strolling around the offered pieces of the landscape’s body. Hidden behind my telephoto lens, I am gazing at every detail of it, responding to an urge to feel and seize all the shapes emerging from the still fertile breach of a disaster and its offspring.”
― from the artist’s statement