Exclusion Zone

In the fall of 2021, I visited the exclusion Zone of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. I saw an empty, abandoned and overgrown city. Empty and crumbling houses. Streets turning into forest. The smell of autumn mixed with the smell of some kind of ghostliness and unreality, sometimes voiced by the crackling of the dosimeter. Of course, the enormous tragedy of the current war, this terrible barbaric russian invasion, pushes into the background the impressions and emotions of visiting the Zone. I wish such tragedies would not happen. The imagination involuntarily draws scenarios for correcting the past, but it is impossible to change the negative past simply by changing black to white, while it is impossible to reverse time and events. Alas, people are bad at learning from their mistakes. The war showed this once again. But something must force humanity to learn to think inversely, to overturn the existing state of affairs, to find extraordinary solutions to problems, and not to alienate and isolate them.

In the project I used photographs from the Internet taken in Pripyat before the disaster and my own, taken in the fall of 2021.