NYC Scene: Fukushima Autoradiography

Shimpei Takeda, Trace, #16, Lake Hayama

The selection of works currently on display at the International Center of Photography (ICP; 6th Ave. and 43 St., pay what you wish on Friday 5-8 pm) makes you wonder whether these works have been created during a doodling class at the nearest daycare. The walls of ICP are plastered with images that betray startling lack of talent, substance, and skill. How these authors managed to display their works at ICP is puzzling.

The only exceptions to this unfortunate rule are contributed by the Japanese authors Sohei Nishino and Shimpei Takeda. Sohei Nishino creates gorgeous and mind-boggling "diorama maps" of large cities from a mosaic of black-and-white photos that he takes at a multitude of different locations in each city. His maps follow artistic and visual traditions of the medieval paintings and icons, in which the rules of perspective were dictated by the logic and importance of places and events and their interrelations. From afar, Nishino's maps look like Boschian landscapes and up close they resemble gigantic jigsaw puzzles or scrapbooks; they can be viewed briefly or contemplated and examined at length, depending on the viewer's attention span and level of interest.

Shimpei Takeda deserves an honorable mention for his project titled Trace - cameraless records of radioactive contamination. Trace is a series of "autoradiographs" of radioactive soil from the area around the Fukushima nuclear power plant, which was damaged as a result of the earthquake and tsunami in 2011. In the following year, Takeda, who was born in Sukagawa, about 40 miles from Fukushima, collected soil samples at various locations around the power plant. He then placed these samples onto sheets of photosensitive film (Ilford HP5 Plus) and exposed the film over a period of one month. The process is explained on Takeda's website and is very similar to the autoradiography method used in biomedical research to study the distribution of radioactive tracers in ex vivo tissue samples. The level of radiation at Lake Hayama (image above) is given as 1.8 µSv/h in air and 6.4 µSv/h in the soil, which means that Lake Hayama is not a place to linger. It is the most contaminated place in the collection, followed by Nihonmatsu Castle (1.9 µSv/h in air, 4.3 µSv/h in soil) and Asako Kuni-tsuko shrine (air, 1.2 µSv/h; soil, 3.8 µSv/h). The remaining sites have considerably lower dose rates. Several Trace prints are now displayed at ICP, but their impact is diminished in comparison to the impression created by the entire collection on the author's site.

I used to tell my colleagues that they ought to print their beautiful immunofluorescence images and sell them as art, but now it appears that autoradiography images can also become art. Notably, Takeda successfully financed his project through kickstarter and sold limited edition gelatin prints of the works from the Trace series.

Update 01.03.2015: See a more recent post, Fukushima Shoes, about a high concept design created by Sputniko! and Masaya Kushino to draw attention to the consequences of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.