Maki Fukuoka’s research and teaching interests are coordinated by two broad axes: histories of seeing and alternative modes of knowing. Her first book, The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality and Representing the Real in Nineteenth-Century Japan, excavated how the notion of shashin, which came to be used for photography in the 19th century, circulated and articulated a particular need of knowing among the practitioners of materia medica. This paper focuses on contemporary photography, namely Tsuchida Hiromi's publication Fukushima (2018). It explores how Tsuchida visualises and narrativises the region through a new metaphorical approach that challenges how and what we can know about the area that has been marked by the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami.
