FUKUSHIMA: THE INVISIBLE PAIN
BY FLORIAN RUIZ
Florian Ruiz is a French photographer who creates projects to express the atmospheres, feelings, and sensations of desolate places. In hi recent works, he sought to test the bounds of photography by challenging its ability to render an image of what is invisible to the eye by means of time and distortion. He's using assembly, collage, super impression; processes that reinvent and twist the very landscape. He favors a pinhole camera to portray the unexpected, the fortuitous, and the deformed as a multiple reality.
His most recent work, « Fukushima, invisible pain » is second of the Sony World Photography 2013 in the professional Conceptual category, finalist of the International Emerging Artist Award 2013, won the Arpia prize 2014 and finalist of the LensCulture Earth Awards 2015. Florian Ruiz is living and working in Tokyo.
synopsis
Within the natural environment and in the areas surrounding cities across Fukushima prefecture, I have captured the invisible pain of radiation. With an ear to the rhythm of the seasons as in traditional Japanese engravings, I hoped to capture the ever-shifting perceptions of nature, where radiation accumulates the most.
I used a pinhole camera with long exposure times to create a record of the presence of radioactive danger. A dosimeter measured the level of radiation in microSieverts (μSv) received during each exposure.
My ambition with this project was to find a balance and organization in a chaotic world, while emphasizing the intransience of beauty.