Boston

Human and natural disasters can numb the mind with their brute regularity. Wars, riots, fires, earthquakes, floods, shipwrecks and other calamities have been photographed since the 19th century—so many thousands by now that news editors can anticipate the tropes of misery and violence before they see pictures of them, whether it is lines of refugees fleeing cities after an invasion or suburban tracts reduced to kindling by a tornado.

And yet, familiar though images of destruction may seem, each terrible event is unique, not only as it affects individuals and communities but also in its historical coordinates. Daily variations of time and place ensure that consciences should never sleep.

“In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11,” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, exhibits the responses of 17 artists (15 in photographs, two in video) to events of March 3, 2011, a “Triple Disaster” that was in its own ways as traumatic for Japan as 9/11 was for the U.S.

At 2:46 p.m., Japan Standard Time, on an otherwise normal Friday afternoon, monitors detected an underwater earthquake 43 miles off the northeast coast of Honshu, the country’s main island. Registering 9.0, the fourth most powerful ever recorded, the tremor was picked up on instruments as far away as Norway and triggered enormous ocean waves. Successive walls of water, some of them 30 feet high, took under an hour to reach the Sendai plain.