Miyamoto Ryuji's photo collection "KOBE 1995 After the Earthquake" is an important work that documents Kobe immediately after the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake that occurred on January 17, 1995.
Collapsed buildings, torn roads, exposed structures - this book takes an extremely calm and thorough look at the city, with the traces of the disaster still etched in its wake, before any reconstruction or narrative had taken place.
Miyamoto produced the series "KOBE 1995 After the Earthquake" in 1995, focusing on photographing buildings damaged by the earthquake. This series was highly praised and was selected for the Japan Pavilion exhibition at the 6th Venice Biennale Architecture Exhibition in 1996. It also won the Golden Lion at the same exhibition.
It is unusual for a Japanese photographer to receive this award at the Venice Biennale, the world's premier stage for art and architecture, and this work was a decisive opportunity to make Miyamoto Ryuji's name known internationally.
For Miyamoto, who has continued to photograph ruins and structures, capturing the traces that time and history leave on architecture, post-earthquake Kobe was not an incidental subject, but a site that exposed to the utmost the fragility of cities, people, and modern architecture. By excluding human figures and emotional drama and simply capturing the damage to the architecture itself, he presents the disaster not as an "event" but as a "material reality."
The piles of rubble and the exposed cross-sections of the buildings are a sign of destruction, but at the same time they also visualize the distortions and limitations that have been inherent in postwar Japanese cities. There is no sentimentality here, and only the overwhelming weight of time and material masses rises in silence.
"KOBE 1995 After the Earthquake" is not only a record of the earthquake disaster, but also a book that fundamentally questions the relationship between cities, architecture, and photographic expression, making it an indispensable photo book for Japanese photography since the 1990s, and even for the history of architectural expression.
