Open Your Eyes is an outdoor photo festival in Zurich, Switzerland, until October 15, 2023. It is an effort to inform and understand the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) through photography.
The first photo of the Chernobyl disaster taken 14 hours after the nuclear catastrophe went viral yesterday along with the fascinating story behind it.
Ukrainian photographer Maxim Dondyuk has been collecting and archiving photos and negatives that he has found in the Chernobyl exclusion area for the last six years. He has rescued around 15,000 artifacts, which include films, photos, postcards, and letters, but with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he has been forced to put his Untitled Project from Chernobyl on hold.
It’s been nearly 10 years since I first visited the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It was a great experience for me. I could finally see the place I’d previously only known from books and TV and the tart taste of the Lugol’s iodine I had to drink a few days after the disaster.
Last year, more than 120,000 tourists visited the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and in 2020 that number is expected to double. Mass tourism has forever become a part of the Exclusion Zone, mostly because of the successful HBO series “Chernobyl.”
The DUGA over-the-horizon radar was one of the most important elements of the early warning system against an American nuclear attack on the USSR. More expensive to build than the nearby nuclear power plant, the complex consisted to two massive sets of receiving antennas located in Chernobyl and one transmission unit—which no longer exists—60km away in the town of Lubech-1.
It’s been 3 years since the giant, 36,000-ton New Safe Confinement (better known as The Arch) was put over the damaged old sarcophagus that helps contain the radiation from the Chernobyl disaster. A symbolic moment that also summed up my 10 years of work documenting the Chernobyl Zone. However, just as the building of the new sarcophagus didn't finish the work inside related to eliminating the radioactive threat, I still have a reason to come here.
A few years ago, I visited the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone with an infrared camera. We always hear praises of the might of Mother Nature, how it renders useless mans’ creations and bears life above the ruins. Well, it’s something that is always felt, but never on such a huge scale. This place IS the place for these contrasts.
Before you read the rest of the article, and it will be a long read, please allow me to share a few thoughts with you. Visiting the abandoned city of Pripyat and the disaster site of Chernobyl was an experience that I was looking forward to for a very long time.
Chernobyl and the nearby city of Prypyat is a common subject, particularly for URBEX photographers who go there to document the deserted town. But photographer Alina Rudya's project/book Prypyat Mon Amour is different. Her family was there when the infamous accident happened, and when she returned to photograph the people whose lives were changed, she returned 'home' as it were.
My name is Grzegorz Sawa-Boryslawski, and I'm a Polish photographer whose work since 2005 has been focus on pinhole and zone plate photography. In 2014 and 2015, I shot the world's first pinhole photos inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
While working with CBS News to capture footage for a 60 Minutes segment about the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, filmmaker Danny Cooke got to explore the haunted landscape there in a way most people haven't yet: by drone.
The resulting video, released just 4 days ago, is called Postcards from Pripyat, Chernobyl, and it's every bit as eerie as you would imagine.