There’s something interesting happening around Akihiko Okamura’s The Memories of Others at the moment. The photobook has found a new audience, the accompanying film has brought Okamura’s story to people who may never have encountered his work before, and there is a renewed sense that these photographs have something to share with us-more than half a century after many of them were made.
It feels particularly appropriate to be looking at the work during Heritage Week. “Heritage” can be an oddly loaded word. We usually think of it as something solid and established: buildings, monuments, archives, objects carefully preserved behind glass. Photography gives us another kind of heritage-one that is much more slippery. A photograph can preserve a place, a person, or a moment without necessarily telling us what it means. Sometimes that meaning only arrives later, when we look back and realise what has changed.
Born in Tokyo in 1929, Okamura was already an experienced international photojournalist when he first came to Ireland in 1968, having photographed conflict in Vietnam, Biafra, and Ethiopia. He returned, settled here with his family in 1969, and remained until his death in 1985. He arrived as a Japanese photographer, but his long life and work in Ireland gave him a perspective that was both outside and increasingly familiar.
You can feel that in the photographs. There is an obvious visual history of the Troubles that many of us have inherited: black-and-white photographs of barricades, soldiers, smoke, burning buildings and moments of confrontation. Okamura photographed some of this world too, but his work often seems to look slightly to the side of it. Made largely in colour, his photographs have a distinctive, almost cinematic quality. Greens are soft, skies are grey, reds and yellows appear unexpectedly. A military checkpoint sits within an ordinary street scene; children occupy the same frame as soldiers; a roadside memorial becomes part of the landscape.
What makes the work so compelling is this attention to the everyday. Okamura understood that photographing conflict doesn't necessarily mean photographing violence. It can mean photographing the waiting, the routine, and the domestic-the moments when nothing appears to be happening. His photographs ask you to look twice.
The title The Memories of Others feels especially apt. Okamura arrived in Ireland without a personal history of the conflict, yet over time Ireland became part of his own life. His photographs don't attempt to offer a definitive account of the Troubles. Instead, they give us fragments: faces, streets, landscapes, gestures, and fleeting moments. Together they feel closer to the way memory actually works-incomplete, subjective, and full of details whose significance becomes clearer with time.
For decades, much of Okamura's Irish work remained relatively little known. Photo Museum Ireland's work with the Okamura Estate and curator Masako Toda, as well as Pauline Vermare and Atelier EXB, helped bring the archive back into view, including the digitisation and preservation of the original transparencies. The Memories of Others brings more than 70 of these photographs together in a beautifully produced photobook, alongside essays exploring Okamura's life and work.
For Heritage Week, The Memories of Others is a particularly fitting book to pick up: a remarkable piece of photographic heritage, and a reminder that sometimes the memories that become most important to us are the ones that began as somebody else's.
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