Photo Set | Lost and Found


Lost and Found Project: Family photos swept by the 3.11 East Japan tsunami opened at CCP Melbourne Thursday 31st May and is being exhibited until July 15 before coming to Wallflower Photomedia Gallery in Mildura. 

There are three posters available for sale through CCP which each have different prints of photographs and information explaining about the volunteer group “Memory Salvage", the Lost & Found Project, and about Yamamoto.

On their website the crew from Lost and Found explain about the initiation of the poster appeal:

Our plan is to collect donations for the people of the town of Yamamoto from the Exhibits. We decided to sell posters when a friend of mine commented that he didn't know how much he should give since he’s not accustomed to charitable giving. We thought buying posters is an easy means for people like my friend to make a donation. 

We hope to bring the exhibit to many locations, and in order to make this a sustainable project, 70% of proceeds will be donated, and the remaining 30% will be used as an administrative fee, such as the cost of printing and travel. Other than selling posters, we have a donation box set up at the exhibition hall. The money raised by the donation box will be all donated.

You can also donate directly through http://lostandfound311.jp/en/#donation. The money raised will go through the local NPO, Yunihuri-Miyagi to be used by the Residents’ Councils of the temporary housing in the town of Yamamoto. There are 8 temporary housing locations, in many cases, the heads of the Residents’ Councils are paying the necessary administrative expenses out of their own pockets. Donations for Yamamoto-cho can be made using credit cards starting at appx: $13.10 AU (1,000 yen)

This project to bring Lost and Found to Australia was initiated by Munemasa Takahashi and Hiroshi Hatate in Japan and Kristian Haggblom from Wallflower Photomedia Gallery in Mildura.

Lost and Found Project:  Family photos swept by the 3.11 East Japan tsunami will open at  CCP Melbourne  tomorrow May 31st at 6pm before coming to Wallflower Photomedia Gallery in Mildura.

This powerful exhibition displays damaged and orphaned family photographs retrieved during the clean up efforts following the devastating tsunami in March 2011. About 750,000 photos were collected from the rubble and volunteers for The Memory Salvage Project have cleaned, digitized, numbered and returned at least 20,000 family snapshots but some were too badly eroded to ever be identified.

In  New Yorker's Photobooth, photographer Munemasa Takahashi speaks of the exhibition and why the images are so moving:


After the disaster occurred, the first thing the people who lost their loved ones and houses came to look for was their photographs… Only humans take moments to look back at their pasts, and I believe photographs play a big part in that. This exhibit makes us think of what we have lost, and what we still have to remember about our past.


The Aperture exposures blog  also had an extract from Aperture magazine issue 206 , where photography critic Mariko Takeuchi writes:

In the cities, towns, and village affected by the disaster, a vast number of personal photographs were salvaged, pulled from underneath rubble and mud by all sorts of people. They were discolored by saltwater and covered with dirt; some were misshapen or even emitted foul odors. With very few exceptions, it was impossible to identify the people who had made the photographs, their subjects, or their owners—if indeed they were still alive.

This exhibition humanizes the troubling abstraction statistics and death tolls and generated world-wide interest and a Discovery channel special . Thousands of these abstracted images have been assembled into this powerful and visually stunning travelling exhibition.