Weaving together images from her 2020 series “A New River” and the video piece “My Cherry,” along with new work, Ai Iwane’s photobook “A New River Flows” crystallizes as a haunting and fascinating meditation on loss and memory, and on the connections that form between a place and the people who live there.
Although set in Fukushima in the aftermath of the 2011 disaster, “A New River Flows” focuses on other catastrophes and their aftermaths. Iwane’s brilliant sequences of almost-candid snapshots and portraits, nightly dreamscapes, cherry blossoms glowing brightly against the dark, scenes from her personal and family life, and, occasionally, photographs of Fukushima’s overwhelming natural landscapes connect fantasy and documentary, record and myth, and reality and fiction. But rather than becoming a muddy mess that swallows meaning, in Iwane’s “A New River Flows,” each element, each photograph, and each painful event (Iwane’s afterword provides more detail) illuminates the others, layering memory, time, and experience into a dense “visual metaphor for the transient nature of our existence,” as Pauline Vermare notes in her essay “All the Light that Remains” at the back of the book.
“I feared that darkness,
and I feared my mother, who walked toward it.
While her remains are carried downstream along this river into the cycle of this world,
my thoughts travel upstream, toward its source.
In the darkness that awaits, I visualize photographs of the dead.”
— from Ai Iwane’s afterword
“There is nothing more unspeakable, and seemingly unsurmountable, than the loss of a loved one. Beyond the sudden and definitive absence, it seems impossible to not lose their memory, too. The sound of their voice, the feel of their gaze, the trace of their presence in our world. More so than any other form of art, photography can bring us the closest to experiencing the memory of a presence, of a consciousness, by capturing the light that remains.”
— from Pauline Vermare’s text “All the Light that Remains”
