These photographs are images of the city of Tokyo that I created after meeting the survivors and hearing their stories of the night of the Great Tokyo Air Raids. Since this project started from "Surface" section introduced before, and through the interviews of them, I just realized another layer of the cityscapes. All of these images were taken with a thermal imaging camera. The reason for this is that in the interviews with air raid survivors, the first thing they remembered about the night of the air raid was the visual information. I felt that a thermal imaging camera would be the right tool to reproduce information related mainly to temperature, such as the scene of the city in red flames, the fact that it was as bright as daylight, and the heat that seemed to burn to the core of the body. In addition, some people clearly remembered the blackened and charred human figure, which contrasted with the color of the brightness and horror of the flames. And for some reason, some of them had no auditory information, and their memories repeated themselves like a silent movie. In light of this, I thought that still images, rather than moving images, were suitable for this context.

The landscapes in the images were selected from the routes and places where the air raid survivors actually evacuated, the places where their parents' homes were located, and the neighborhoods around the areas they were associated with where they had spent time before the war.

The photographs are not surface views of the same Tokyo scenery, but rather reproductions of the "inward landscapes of their memories"

 

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