Kazuma Obara

(Japan)

Kazuma Obara is a photographer and Journalist, born in Iwate, Japan in 1985. He graduated MA Photojournalism/Documentary course at the University of the Arts London. With the themes of war, nuclear, and natural disasters, he continues to document the individual people who become invisible in the midst of disasters.

After the tsunami and nuclear disaster in 2011 in Japan, he began documenting the nuclear labour of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The documents were published in the photobook “Reset Beyond Fukushima”, by Lars Müller Publishers, Switzerland in March 2012.

In 2014, he focused on handicapped victims and orphans of World War Two in Japan and his self-published photobook Silent Histories was shortlisted for Paris Photo/Aperture Photo Book Award. The book was also published by Editorial RM(Mexico/Spain) in 2015 as a new edition.

In 2015, continuing his pursuit of nuclear issues as a long term project, Obara was focusing on victims of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. His project ‘Exposure’ was selected for World Press Photo 2016 People category 1st prize.

In 2020, Obara received National Geographic Covid-19 Emergency Fund and documented the mourning process of patients of Covid-19 in the Zone.

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Calvary Island – Tracing the memories of humanity

The project is a human documentary that focuses on the memories of people who have been discriminated against and related to infectious diseases. In the long history of the human beings, invisible viruses have constantly threatened society, sometimes causing divisions between uninfected and infected people across generations. The project traces the memories of people who have experienced infectious diseases in Japan from the first half of the 20th century by using photographs/ videos and audios.

With the new coronavirus infection, which began to spread in 2020, discrimination against infected people and essential workers has become a social problem in Japan. Many of those people hid their faces, making it difficult for their presence to be perceived as anything other than a number. And these effects remain in society.

Through this project, I challenge myself to visualise the life of individual people in the history of infection from the past to the present. I hope that this will be an opportunity for us to think about our past, present, and future.