Hiroshima Album
Since a live-in-apprenticeship in the mountains of Uji in 1996/97 and a consecutive job as studio assistant in an Outsider Art Center in Shiga til 1998 I travel regularly back to Kyoto, Japan. Living in this foreign culture has had an immense impact on me and the experiences there have formed me most, as a person as well as an artist.
Japan has its own highly unique culture, but at the same time is also very much westernized. To me the combination of both creates a very surreal atmosphere that is a source of constant inspiration, next to the readily available abundance of especially visual culture over several centuries.
In 2007 I visited for the first time the city of Hiroshima and the Peace Memorial Park. The photos in this album are my diary from this visit.
To fully understand the meaning of these pictures in context of the history of this particular place I ask you to also look up the photographs of Joe O’Donnell, an U.S. Marine Corps photographer, who was stationed in Japan for seven months after the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. His photographs document the situation how it looked like back then. His son created this MySpace page for his father: http://www.myspace.com/thephoenixventure.
