There is a moment in my life that marks a split between a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. I was around 12 years old, sitting cross-legged on the cream carpet in my family’s living room in Ottawa when I opened a large, heavy book, awkward in my skinny arms. The texture of the paper was strange: it was matt, a word I didn’t know then. The ink was blacker than anything I had seen. A pure void – no light, no reflection, nothing. My fingers left small shiny traces on the paper, which took a few seconds to disappear. My child’s mind could not understand what it was seeing.

Bodies. Contortions. Something was very wrong. Humans who had been put together incorrectly, limbs sticking out at odd angles, crumpled like broken birds’ wings, like snapped twigs.

I kept looking, trying to make sense of these photographs.

Pipes discharging wastewater into a black sea.

Schools of fish. Boats with men and women hauling bulging nets onto the decks.

A sparkling factory, its lights like stars in a black sky. It looked like a spaceship.

I was staring into my father’s copy of Minamata (1975), W Eugene Smith and Aileen M Smith’s masterpiece of photojournalism with accompanying essays. It was published three years after the Smiths’ photo essay ‘Death-Flow from a Pipe’ had appeared in Life magazine. Eugene Smith and his then-wife Aileen had spent three years in the small fishing village of Minamata in Japan documenting the effects of mercury poisoning by the Japanese Chisso Corporation for the purposes of their essay, which was expanded to become the hefty Minamata.

Aileen M Smith and W Eugene Smith in Minimata. Photo © Takeshi Ishikawa

About halfway through the book, I came across the photo that truly claimed me, spread across two pages.

The left is almost all black. We are in a small room; the photographer must also be in the room as the figures are so close to us. On the right-hand page, a woman holds the rigid body of a teenager. The teenager is naked. All we can make out is her three-quarter profile, eyes rolled upwards, her teeth showing through a slightly opened mouth, her skinny torso, ribs, deformed hands hovering in the air; one knee resting on her mother’s wrist, the other hovering. Her thick black hair flops back from her forehead. You can almost feel the steam filling the room like hot breath.

This photo, ‘Tomoko and Mother in the Bath’ by Eugene Smith, triggered something profound that I have never been able to shake or even fully comprehend. Why this image? Why did it penetrate so deeply? The effect it had on me has something to do with the fact that it was pure accident that led me to it; the photo found me, rather than the other way round. By discovering it in one of my father’s books, I felt I had stumbled upon a secret, something I wasn’t meant to see. The pain captured in this photo – and captured so humanely – was something that I, a child of the Canadian suburbs, had never seen. This kind of before-and-after moment is expressed by Susan Sontag in her book On Photography (1977). Her ‘first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror’, she tells us, was ‘a kind of revelation’. It was photos of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau that she came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945 that broke her. ‘Nothing I have seen – in photographs or in real life – ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously,’ she writes. ‘Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was 12) and after.’

Seeing Tomoko’s young, contorted body was the moment I realised there was such a thing as horror and that those who are most affected are often victims of chance or fate. Here was a girl who, by dint of being born in Minamata rather than Ottawa, had been poisoned. All these years later, I am unnerved by the fact that Tomoko’s appearance was so unlike a healthy teenager that Sontag, writing about this very picture, could not make out that she was female, and referred instead to ‘Smith’s photograph of a dying youth writhing on his [sic] mother’s lap’. The youth was not male nor was she dying – she lived another five years. The composition of this photo echoes the classic pose of the Virgin Mary holding a dying Christ. Sontag sees it as a ‘Pietà for the world of plague victims’. Tomoko died for us all, is the subtext here – but it is important to note that she did not die from an uncontainable virus. She died because of a human-made environmental catastrophe.

Michelangelo’s Pietà in St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. Courtesy Wikipedia

From 1932 to 1968, the Chisso Corporation dumped methylmercury-laced wastewater into Minamata Bay. From the mid-1940s, a ‘strange disease’ started to appear in town. At first, the symptoms – seizures, loss of motor control, numbness, paralysis, sensory impairment and death within weeks, months or years from the first signs of illness – were described anecdotally. However, in 1957, a Chisso Corporation doctor gave it a name: Minamata disease. Babies were born deformed, blind and with a range of disabilities as the mercury passed through their mother’s placenta. Sometimes, the unborn baby acted as a sponge for the toxin, leaving some mothers without symptoms. This was the case for Tomoko Kamimura. Her family called her their ‘treasure child’ because she spared her mother from the disease.

Just as in fairy tales, the poison gets out, it spreads; there is always a story in its wake

For years, the Chisso Corporation would not accept any correlation between its industrial waste and Minamata disease. Yet this connection made so much sense – even to my child’s mind: you poison the water, the fish end up toxic. People eat the fish, they get sick. How could it have........

© Aeon