KAMAKURA, Japan, Aug. 9 Kyodo -- Black-and-white photos of a joyous spring wedding celebration, satisfied farmers with baskets of produce at their feet, and smiling elderly ladies selling delicious-looking strawberries, are not what one would expect from a photo exhibition on nuclear victims.

At a photo exhibition on ''The Hibakusha of the World'' in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, southwest of Tokyo, photographer and film director Seiichi Motohashi presented his record of nuclear radiation victims from a unique point of view.

''Nuclear (technology) is not something human beings can control. It is one of the things humans should not have touched. However, instead of using 'nuclear' as the theme (for my photos and documentaries), I wanted to convey the message of 'life.' This is a theme connected to everyone, young and old,'' Motohashi told Kyodo News.

Motohashi, 62, has produced two award-winning documentary films and published three photo collections on the lives of villagers remaining in evacuated areas that have been declared uninhabitable due to radioactive pollution from the 1986 nuclear fallout of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine.

In April 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl power plant overheated and caused two explosions that released deadly radiation in the atmosphere for 10 days.

People living in Chernobyl were exposed to radioactivity 100 times greater than the U.S. atomic bomb dropped in Hiroshima at the end of World War II, according to experts.

When Motohashi, a Tokyo native, started with photography in the 1970s, a time when Japan enjoyed high growth and chased after economic materialism, he searched for the ''really precious things in life one should live for.''

''All my photo collections are made based on the same feeling -- to show the real richness of life for human beings,'' he said.

Since his first visit to Chernobyl as a volunteer in 1991, five years after the nuclear accident, Motohashi has returned to nearby villages over 30 times in the past decade to record the lives of villagers.

''I found the real basic happiness in these people of the countryside of Chernobyl, despite the nuclear contamination,'' he remarked.

That is why his documentaries do not tell the story of a nuclear tragedy with smoking reactors. Instead, they deliver the message of the real happiness and richness of life, a lesson he believes the rest of the world should learn from.

Although most documentaries tend to show viewers the reality with facts and statistics, Motohashi wanted to do more than that. ''I want to stimulate the imagination of people watching the film, to put something into their hearts and make them think.''

Motohashi's first documentary in 1997, ''Nadja's Village,'' was about a girl and her family in a village in Belarus near Chernobyl where most villagers had left due to the radioactive pollution.

The film, showing the villagers' toughness and endurance in overcoming the terrible disaster in a land where its soil is poisonous but the scenery is like paradise, won several festival prizes and was an official selection at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1998.

In 2000, Motohashi returned to Belarus with his crew to produce ''Alexei and the Spring,'' which is about an abandoned village inhibited by a handful of elderly villagers and a disabled youth.

The village has a spring that carries miraculously uncontaminated water, which the villagers believe to be ''100-year-old rainwater.'' It has enabled the villagers to survive although the soil and forest have all been polluted by nuclear radiation.

''The villagers never complained about their lives. They were satisfied with what they have'' despite the hardships caused by radioactive pollution and the lack of modern luxuries, such as telephones and cars, Motohashi explained.

This second documentary also received high praise from critics worldwide. It won the Readers' Prize of the Berliner Zeitung and International Cine Club Prize in the Berlin International Film Festival as well as the Grand Prix at the St. Petersburg International Film Festival this year.

Motohashi was humbled by the villagers' way of living. ''Their hands are their tools, they work for survival not for making money. When I shook their rough hands, I felt ashamed of myself,'' he said.

Over the past decade, however, even people living in the areas around Chernobyl are starting to forget about the nuclear disaster that had happened almost two decades ago.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, people there have also started to chase after economic richness, Motohashi said.

''The younger generation from the villages have all left for the cities in search of 'better' lives,'' he added.

From his encounters with the villagers, Motohashi concluded with a message to all peoples of the world, ''I believe that every country, religion and people should have their own respective set of values. It does not have to be the same thing for the whole world.''

''What's even more important is to recognize, not deny, the differences. The world should not be made into 'one','' Motohashi said, reflecting upon the global trend to western values and modernization.