


Family Album
Naoya Yoshikawa
A photographic exhibition by Naoya Yoshikawa titled Family Album. Yoshikawa's understanding of photography deepened after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, when volunteers and local organisations devoted themselves to salvaging water-damaged family albums from the wreckage. Thousands of images were carefully cleaned, catalogued, and returned, becoming symbols of survival and continuity. According to modern neuroscience, human memory does not function like a video recorder. Memories are not stored and replayed exactly as they happened. Instead, they exist in fragments - reconstructed and re-imagined each time we recall them. As a result, memories shift over time, becoming vague, altered, or incomplete. A photograph, on the other hand, appears to offer certainty - capturing a moment as it was, illuminated before the lens. But it too is limited. It cannot show what lies beyond the frame, nor the unseen emotions or context behind an image. In Family Album, Yoshikawa reinterprets his father’s photographs through distortions, layering, and digital interventions—transforming them into reconstructed memory objects. Some works draw from remembered landscapes, blurring the line between record and recollection. Yoshikawa’s work explores this paradox: the photograph is both factual and fragile - a powerful aid to memory, yet inevitably incomplete.