In 2011, an earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, and the surrounding towns were emptied. Robert Knoth and Antoinette de Jong spent five years photographing and filming what remained: abandoned farmhouses, untended gardens, agricultural fields gone feral, and the wooded hills pressing back in. They also interviewed people who had once lived there. Tree and Soil, published by Hartmann Books in 2020, gathers that work alongside historical material drawn from the collection of Philipp Franz von Siebold, the nineteenth-century naturalist and explorer whose Japanese specimens, artefacts, and woodblock prints—among them works by Kawahara Keiga—are held by the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden.
The pairing is the book’s argument. Siebold belongs to the Age of Exploration, when the natural world was catalogued as resource and wonder; his collections show how deeply Japanese culture has been shaped by and rooted in nature. That era, the photographers suggest, can be read as a prelude to the Anthropocene, the age in which human activity remakes the planet. Set beside those historical images, the evacuated landscapes around Fukushima become a contemporary case study in the same long transformation, their deserted fields and forests carrying the residue of human presence.
Knoth and de Jong have described themselves as archaeologists of the future, trying to read a place after a mysterious force has driven its inhabitants away. Their documentary hyperrealism is combined here with more abstract and conceptual strategies, a layered approach to narrative they have pursued across earlier long-term projects. The editing was carried out by the photographers with curator Iris Sikking; the essay is by Erik A. de Jong; the design is by Kummer&Herrman; the printing by Rob Stolk.
The book is modest in extent—112 pages, ten foldouts, 42 photographs, 47 scans and illustrations—but its structure rewards close reading. For collectors attentive to the photobook as an edited object rather than a portfolio, the sequence of landscape, archive, and text is the point: an argument about time and consequence assembled with unusual care, in a deliberate one-time edition.
