Abstract

"Loss of certainties", "states of uncertainty" and "permanent vulnerability" conform traits related to societies and geographies in which there is a permanent risk of natural disasters. It is a common tendency to associate the process of identity construction in people with certain mechanisms which allow us to recognize our ways of being and inhabiting the spaces that surround us both individually as collectively. Concerning this, images of natural disasters put forward a series of reflections regarding different collective events as they closely examine a universe apparently characterized by a scientific, rational or global sense which can only be fully conveyed by means of an affectionate approach both in physical or emotional terms. Is the own manifestation of nature -or its inner behaviour- the one which all of a sudden becomes a sort of “adversary” of the stability that sustains our reality? How it would be to observe ourselves through the lens of a memory in a latent state of fragility? How it would be to recognize ourselves through an unknown landscape which is permanently disintegrating itself? Both from a poetic and an economic point of view this essay deals with a comparison of a number of press photographs of Chile’s 2010 and Japan’s 2011 tsunamis. The process of correlation of these natural phenomena brings forth a referential similarity between their images which allows us to define a number of questions and meanings from a highly heterogeneous field of study. Such a study unveils other ways of pondering images with a high massive access not precisely by illustrating or exemplifying but by playing with societies’ collective memory file as an active power embracing both knowledge and wisdom.