In August, The New Yorker commissioned Kyoko Hamada to photograph the disaster area of Fukushima, Japan. Hamada was a natural choice: her photographs are quiet and refined; her composition deliberate and clean. She captured the eerie feeling that permeated the towns she visited in Fukushima, and was able to accomplish the most difficult task of photographing what wasn’t there, or wasn’t necessarily visual: the immeasurable loss of life and livelihoods, and the looming threat of the nuclear fallout. Please read Kyoko’s heartfelt Letter to Fukushima