The vastness of a ghost city

If you ever get a chance to visit Pripyat, thinking to yourself "I have 3 days - I'm going to photograph the entire place!" believe me when I say, you never will. The city is so huge and you want to have at least an hour per building to shoot something half decent. I think I would need at least 3 more visits to get a comprehensive photographic essay of this forgotten location.

Click the map to enlarge it (you'll need to - trust me). You'll see just how little we shot in 3 days on a private tour....

Our exhibit in Slate Art Magazine

Two Canadian artists document Chernobyl 25 years after the nuclear disaster while the world watches another unfold. Volatile Particles contrasts man's impact on the environment with nature's resilience. The photographs blend images of normality (the ghosts of the past) superimposed on post-Chernobyl devastation and infestation (the present-day stark reality amid the afterlife of the Exclusion Zone). Poignant, moving and relevant – this is a timely introspection addressing our ever-evolving nuclear depression.

Reflections on Ruin

It's been a long road, filtering through the hundreds of photos from Pripyat and the reactor, trying to whittle them down to those few perfect ones. The ones that capture the essence of our trip, truly convey the mood of that abandoned and silent city, and tell the story that we ourselves can only begin to fully comprehend.

On the overnight train ride from Odessa to Lviv, Photomat had shown me the documentary he had about the Chernobyl incident - I really have to get the name of it from him. It had footage of Pripyat, showing it as an active and lively city just before and after the explosion.

I was amazed at how well preserved the buildings were from what I could see in the footage. Other than windows being shattered, which can probably be chalked up to vandalism more than decay, the structures themselves were in amazing shape. The big difference was the vegetation and animal life.

When we had passed through the main checkpoint heading into the city proper, we were told by Evgeny (photo at right with me), our (amazing) guide that we were now driving on the main thoroughfare. Considering that the road was just wide enough for his car and the trees were canopied and just brushing the top, this seemed quite an impossibility. However, the documentary clearly showed that this main thoroughfare was quite an avenue - along the lines of Toronto's University Avenue - two grand roads with a garden-like divide. We just couldn't see it, nature had taken over completely and the road was one big pothole.

Another difference was in the overall layout of the city. We had made our way to the top of the hotel, sweating in our white alien-like anti-radiation suits, climbing 9 (or 10?) floors to get a wonderful view of the entire city from the long-gone wall-to-wall windows in what I assume had been a penthouse suite. Scanning the horizon, you felt like you were in some Green Party's Utopian cityscape - you could barely see below the 3rd floor of any building as everything was overgrown with trees, shrubs, vines, ferns, and other native forms of vegetation. It was quite beautiful - so green and lush and quiet. You could almost imagine that you were an explorer and had found a lost civilization - until your dosimeter would go off to remind you of all the radiation.

Looking at the documentary gave us a completely different view of the cityscape. Pripyat looked more like what you would expect to see in European locations like Kyiv, Prague, or Vienna. Most of the buildings had vast concrete plazas in front of them and the city had a larger metal/concrete to nature ratio. They were surrounded by forest and had some garden areas around the housing but schoolyards were concrete, and so were roads, and walkways. It's amazing just how easily plants were able to take hold in this concrete jungle and reclaim it.

The other night, we caught a bit of the series Life After People, which is supposed to chronicle in a timeline what will happen to cities once man is gone and nature and animals take over again. Sounded interesting and it's been recommended to me since I like to shoot abandoned spaces. The episode which looks at life after 20 years is supposed to focus entirely on Pripyat as they used it as the real-life example of the level of decay for this time span. I'm looking forward to finding some time to look at that episode and see how well it meshes with my own personal experience.

I was glad that we had watched the documentary after our trip as we could compare what we had seen and experienced to how the city looked and functioned when it was still vital.

Chernobyl - Day 1

(Posted 1 day late due to lack of wi-fi access in the Zone - Photolena)

After a long year of planning, we finally headed out of Kiev today and into the wilds of the Zone. Our guide Yevgeny was raring to go at 7:30am and we headed out into the countryside going northbound towards Belarus.

We hit our first checkpoint 30km outside of Pripyat. A very formal affair - we had to show our passports which were compared to the information that was sent over several weeks before when booking our trip. For a few seconds there I was worried that I had sent them my old passport number when I booked, as I only renewed it a month before the trip and we weren't going to be let in - but these are the kinds of anxiety moments I have. Once we got the all OK, we headed into the town of Chernobyl, where the people who still work at the reactor stay. As there are strict rules about how long you can stay within the Zone, workers either do 15 days in/15 days out or weekdays in/weekends out and have a home outside the perimiter where it's considered "clean". Many of them live in Kyiv and take the 1.5 hour commute in.

We met our guide form the Chernobylinterinform state agency who spent a half hour reading us the disclaimer and rules - which we then had to sign and was kept with us the entire two days and used as our official paperwork to get past the other 2 interior checkpoints:

• don't touch any plants with your bare hands
• keep with the guides at all tiimes as there are packs of wolves around that have begun to bite people during the day
• if you get your camera or video gear contaminated, they are not responsible for it
• this is all at your own risk and you are cool with that

We first got a tour of Chernobyl city - the only church left for all the people, some of the many abandoned homes, and the post office that has a digital display which updates the radiation counts around the zone every minute. We also saw the famous monument erected to commemorate the workers who dies responding to the disaster. It was paid for by the families of the workers and the locals for their "heroes" and reads "For those who saved the world".

We then headed off for the first of the big 2 ultimate photo locations on our lists - the Chernobyl reactor. We stopped on the highway to take some long shots of the sarcophagus, the half-finished cooling towers, and the equally half-finished reactor #4 which was in progress when the disaster happened. The cranes are still on the site and will remain there. We stopped at the bridge to feed the mutant catfish in the man-made cooling pond then proceeded around the reactor to the official "photographer spot" at the nuclear monument. It would have been nice to go and walk around a bit, but it was still awe-inspiring to be standing 300m from the biggest technological disaster of my time. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting a nuclear reactor sarcophagus to look like, but it kind of reminded me of Hearn Generating Station when it had seen better days. They are already beginning construction on the new one as this one is already old and will soon fail.

Our next stop was something I have been dreaming of for quite some time - the abandoned city of Pripyat. It's amazing just how close the city was to the reactor and now wonder that it had to be evacuated. I could have walked over there from the reactor site.

At the checkpoint - our last for the area - we started exploring. Let me just say how fantastic our guide was, We had emailed ahead and let the tour company know that we wanted our time tailored specifically towards photography and even sent a list of the buildings from Google Maps that I had tagged as interesting. I'll be damned if we didn't hit at least 14 of those locations today - which is why I can no longer feel my feet, calves, thighs, or spine. Well worth it. Let's see if I can remember some of the highlights so this blog post doesn't turn into a novel:

• a cafe that had mostly intact stained glass windows made in a way that I had never seen before
• a hospital with medical equipment
• a school filled with desks and a chalkboard full of the names and dates of people who had visited the city
• an orphanage with rooms full of children's bed frames
• the view of the city from the top floor of the main hotel
• the bumper cars in the amusement park
• an Olympic grade swimming pool with 2 levels of high dive boards
• a grade school full of children's gas masks

After a full day of exploration, we headed back to the INterinform building to see if we were irradiated, using a full-sized dosimeter that looked like it was from the 50s. We all passed. It's going to be sweet dreams and a deep sleep for me. We start the adventure all over again with an 8am breakfast tomorrow.

(Day 2 of Chernobyl to be posted tomorrow)

Welcome to the panic room

So we finally got around to putting together our blog - 3 weeks before we leave for Ukraine. I guess introductions are in order and an explanation of why we're embarking on this journey.

I'll let Photomat introduce himself - me, I'm a photographer with a graphic design background. The focus of my photography is forgotten spaces and I have been interested in shooting Chernobyl and Pripyat for quite a while. I've seen the books (Polidori), the exhibits (again Polidori comes to mind), and some great documentaries with exceptional photographs from organizations such as National Geographic. I'm not a documentary style photographer and have wanted to interpret this area in my own style.

Our project is called Volatile Particles - inspired by an article examining the effects of the Chernobyl disaster upon the local area and more widely across the world. It refers to the contaminants that were released into the air from the meltdown and the fact that half of these landed outside the immediate area, some affecting regions as far as the UK. The exhibit will explore the Chernobyl disaster through photography, documentary video, and personal stories of survivors and those who reside in the local area today. By examining the disaster through resident's voices, the aim is to personalize the photography and experience for the viewer. In the end, our exhibit will combine photography, documentary video, personal stories (hopefully), and be juxtaposed with our increasing dependence on the nuclear industry and how we are working to ensure that this type of disaster does not happen on Canadian soil. All thanks in part to the Ontario Arts Council.

And of course, we will have a wild (mis)adventure exploring Ukraine - from Kyiv in the North, to Odessa in the South, and Lviv in the West. So where are we now?

• plane tickets - check
• Chernobyl tour booked - check
• place to stay - check
• itinerary finalized - well, mostly
• have what I need - kinda

Stay tuned for posts of our journey - planning, travel, touring, and final exhibit. Dobranich!