Mayumi Suzuki is a photographer from Onagawa, Miyagi Prefecture. Her work draws on family memory, loss, and the traces that remain within places affected by profound change.
The Restoration Will traces the memory of Suzuki’s parents, who went missing in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, and of Sasaki Photo Studio, the family business they operated in Onagawa. After the disaster, Suzuki recovered her father’s mud-covered lens and portfolio, along with family photographs damaged and partially erased by the tsunami. She brought these surviving materials together with her own photographs to create the book.
Using her father’s muddy lens, Suzuki photographed the landscape of the town, producing dark and blurred images. Damaged family photographs, portraits made by her father, and Suzuki’s own photographs of Onagawa are brought together in an attempt to reconstruct fading memories and family history.
This is the original handmade, self-published edition produced in 2017. Suzuki herself handled the photographs, text, printing, and binding. Only 87 copies were made, the number referring to the 87 years since her family’s photo studio was founded in 1930. A trade edition was later published by Ceiba Editions.
The Restoration Will
Mayumi Suzuki
Self-Published, 2017
197 × 285 × 17 mm
Handmade edition of 87
Signed
