Giles Price’s Restricted Residence takes as its subject not the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown itself but what followed it: the Japanese government’s 2017 decision to lift exclusion orders around Namie and Iitate and to draw residents back with financial incentives, into towns that remain only partly habitable. The reactor is still unrepaired, and radiation hotspots persist across the landscape. Nearly 20,000 people are said to live and work in the area again; the emptiness Price records suggests a different figure, and a different reality. His photographs follow the people who stayed or returned—clean-up and reconstruction crews, medical officers, office workers, a mechanic, a taxi driver kept on retainer because customers are so scarce, a farmer holding on to contaminated cattle he cannot sell and will not kill.
The book’s method is what separates it from straightforward reportage. Price works with thermal imaging, a technology borrowed from medicine and surveying, so that ordinary streets and interiors in Namie and Iitate appear inverted and strange, their heat signatures standing in for hazards the eye cannot see. The effect is to make the invisible stress of the disaster visible without turning it into spectacle. Across eighty pages and forty-two photographs, printed with a custom experimental five-colour profile, the sequence holds that tension between the bureaucratic language of return and the lived fact of an environment that has not been made safe.
Fred Pearce, an environmental writer, contributes an essay, printed in English and Japanese, that places the towns within the wider debate over radiation’s long-term effects—a debate that remains scientifically unresolved. The book’s form reinforces its argument: a sewn booklet in an embossed buckram cover, small enough to hold like a field document, substantial enough to carry the weight of its subject.
For collectors, the interest lies in the combination of an urgent contemporary subject, a technically distinctive photographic approach, and a collaboration between a photographer and a writer whose concerns extend beyond the local case. Published by Loose Joints in 2020, Restricted Residence belongs with serious photographic work on disaster, displacement, and the manufacturing of ordinary life.
