Picturing Life After Devastation (se2)

Arahama in Sendai before and after the tsunami 



http://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/japan-quake-2011/

On March 11, 2011, a tsunami devastated Japan, killing nearly 16,000 people. The media reacted quickly to this turmoil, and thousands of stories and images surfaced the internet within a few days. ABC News published a story comprised solely of images that illustrated the disastrous effect the tsunami had on “dozens of suburbs and tens of thousands homes and businesses” in Japan. The story derived it’s inspiration from aerial photos of these areas before and after this devastation. 

Photos play an important role in the world of media journalism; they give the reader a whole new perspective on a story. Furthermore, they help to engage and inform the reader about the story in a different light. While the usage of photos is not always necessary, when used they are meant to draw in and captivate the reader, allowing them to realize the central message of the article. Images complement the narrative, used to highlight the point of view of the writer. In the tsunami article, however, there is no narrative, except of that in captions. While these captions only reveal the area in which the image is identifying, they are still crucial to the construction of the article because they give the images context. Without them, this article would make no sense. 

This article is unique because it is one of few that actually asks the reader to interact with it to reveal information. The first line of the article instructs you to “hover over each satellite photo to view the devastation caused by the earthquake and tsunami.” The article continues to show you before and after photos of 39 distinct areas in Japan, like Sendai Airport, the Fukushima nuclear plant and Iwaki beach, just to name a few, while the images primarily consist of differing coasts, villages and cities. These photos demonstrate the harsh impact the tsunami had on the environment; there were countless shattered homes and businesses. They resemble a dystopic world that the Japanese were forced to suffer through after this occurrence.

With natural disasters, it’s impossible to imagine what that world was like unless you’ve previously experienced a tragedy like that. Everything from the past life of those people washed away that day. When the news cycles to the U.S. the only basis we have to visualize this is the photos people take. There are millions of images of this tsunami to browse through on blogs and news sites, but also on social media like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. All these images allow people outside of Japan to paint a picture in their heads of what it really could’ve been like. Moreover, photographs documenting events like this are monumental in the building and supporting relief foundations for these areas. They trigger empathy and our emotions drive us to wanting to help them. 

In aerial photography, the reader achieves a new sense of the widespread devastation. They don’t realize the detriments this had on specifically one family or one neighborhood, but rather how the entire country was in ruins. They see what once was stretches of farms, homes, the ocean transform into a blackened dystopia.