Soviet City Frozen In Time

1:23 am, 26th of April, 1986. The Day that changed our world forever

For my Final Project for my BA photography, I had decided to do a project about Chernobyl, I had been interested in the topic since I was a child reading documents at my village library located in eastern Poland.

On the 26th of April in 1986 the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded due to a fault in its design as well as the recklessness of the operators on the night of the explosion. Following the explosion, 31 people died and thousands moved out of the area as it polluted the area and killed its citizens, while the official death toll is 31 the real number is believed to be much higher due to later occurring sicknesses following radiation exposure.

Here's Valery Legasov himself explaining what happened, how he experienced it, and the truth that was at the time hidden from the public. Legasov killed himself a year after the explosion, he was the one to reveal the truth about what happened on that night.

For my Project I travelled down to Kyiv to interview people who grew up there and who worked there, Then I went to the exclusion zone for 3 days, photographing the different areas, meeting different people, and learning more about the power plant as well as what life might have looked like before the disaster.

Walking around you could see where life once was, You can see the books left on the tables, the cars in the streets, the toys in the nursery, and the shelves in the stores. In one moment it was all left, never to be touched again. Yet it stands as a record of time itself, how no matter what might happen to us, it stops for no one and nothing.

I was able to get some amazing shots done from areas where tourists weren't allowed to stop at due to radiation levels. These were some of the best photos and most meaning full to my project, but in the bigger picture, they were also very dangerous as shown below when I took the photo of the 4th reactor. I stood with a small group of people on that particular day that I was tasked to work with and you can hear my Geiger counter going off.

The 4th Reactor

The people I met, the things I saw, it all had a huge impact on me. Only 2 months after I left Russia invaded Ukraine, and with that, part of Chernobyl was damaged, but it lives on in their stories, in our memories, and in my project, it has been an honour and a pleasure to see this historical place one more time before the invasion.

My heart is with the people of Ukraine.