New Books In Art

Gennifer Weisenfeld‘s gorgeous and thoughtful new book explores the visual culture that emerged in the wake of the Kanto earthquake of 1923. Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012) charts a path through the widely-circulating visual tropes that comprised the intermedia landscape of the earthquake’s aftermath. Along the way, images of firestorms and catfish guide us though a genealogy of the belief in the moral connections between human action and disaster in Japan. Photographs, seismograms, and maps introduce us to a “visual lexicon of disaster” in which these images were simultaneously wielded as markers of authority and instruments for masking some important moments of invisibility in the aftermath of the earthquake. A decapitated building, the “ultimate modern ruin,” asks us to contemplate the relationship between the individual, the nation, and modernity in the context of a massive spectacle of destruction. Images of refugee