Chornobyl — Photography, Video and a Photo Essay from the Exclusion Zone
Photography, video, and written work from within the Zone
I visited the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone twice, once in 2008 and again in 2009 — most people still know it by its Russian spelling, Chernobyl, but I've used the Ukrainian transliteration throughout this site. It's a strange place to describe. Abandoned, but not empty. Nature's taken most of it back, but the accident and the evacuation are still written into everything you look at.
The disaster is obviously why anyone goes, but it's not really what stays with you afterward. It's the quiet. Schools with books still piled three feet deep on the floor, apartment blocks with trees growing up through the stairwells, a Ferris wheel that towers over Pripyat and never once carried a passenger.
This page pulls together everything I came away with from both trips: photographs, video I shot in 2009, and a long essay covering the history and what I actually saw. The photos hold a single frozen moment each. The video is what it's like walking through the place in real time. The essay is where I got into the detail — the accident itself, the people, the things that don't fit in a caption.
Chornobyl Photography — Stills from the Exclusion Zone
These photos aren't really about the 1986 accident itself. They're about what's left standing twenty-plus years later: empty classrooms, rusted vehicles nobody's bothered stripping further, apartment blocks half-swallowed by trees, an amusement park that opened only in rumor.
Chornobyl Video — Footage from Inside the Zone (2009)
I shot this on my second trip, in 2009. It's raw footage, straight through Pripyat and the plant, no narration bolted on afterward. Presented in five parts, in the order I filmed them.
Chornobyl Photo Essay — Two Trips Into the Zone
This is the long version, everything that didn't fit in a caption. The night of the accident, what Pripyat and the outer villages look like now, and the people I met, including one of the samosely still living inside the zone.