In an impending distaster, with just minutes to evacuate, what one treasure would you take with you?

People always answer the same: Photos

Why Photos? Because everything else is replaceable.

Photos are our live’s true treasures. They serve us as our memories by chronicling the happy moments of younger days, marking important milestones in our children’s lives, reminding us of loved ones lost. We collect them over the years and assemble them into photo albums which in turn become our own autobiographies.

Imagine the misfortune of a family losing a history of memories in the wake of tragedy like those victims in Japan affected by the events of March 11th. Thats what inspired us to start “Photohoku” a project to rebuild and restart family photo albums of those effected by distaster.

As photographers, we wanted to take photos, and we wanted a way to help that would have a direct impact of the lives of victims, and one way we saw helping was to visit some of the most devastated areas of Tohoku with a box of Instant Film and trunk full of empty photo albums both donated by our sponsor Fujifilm, and attempt to help people start over.

When distaster strikes, life doesn’t just stop. Kids still grow up, relationships blossom anew, relatives still pass on, and new memories have to be made, and so does the task of starting new photo albums. This is how we help.

Below is a collection of photos from of our first visit to Tohoku. We visit the cities of Ishinomaki and Onagawa where we met all kinds of people, listened their stories, made a photo of them and for them, that they could instantly hold and put it an album and encouraged them start again, and rebuild their memories, and make new ones.

We intend to continue this effort by visiting these devastated areas as frequently as your support will allow us, to help to do a small part to help Tohoku and its beautiful people get a new start.

For questions on how to support, please mail Brian@photohoku.org (Eng) or Yuko@photohoku.org (JP).

Thank you!