Tomoko Yoneda (born 1965 in Akashi,
Japan, lives and works in London) studied
photography in the United States and then in London at the Royal College of Art, at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. She realised then that even the most powerful structures and ideologies are ephemeral, and that the society in which we live could be radically transformed in a flash. Deeply questioning the turbulent history of the 20th century, she travelled to Eastern Europe, Northern Ireland, Taiwan, Bangladesh, and more recently to Fukushima in Japan. The resulting photographs are formal compositions of seemingly ordinary places. The titles Yoneda gives to these works bring us back to past events, revealing the traces of forgotten tragedies within our everyday environment.
