Boats used in the clean-up after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 were too radioactive to continue using. Now they are rusting away in the Chernobyl former town harbor.The experience of visiting Chernobyl is hard to capture in a photograph. Everywhere you look, there are buildings crumbling, courtyards becoming forests, abandoned vehicles, rusted out and stripped of spare parts. It can be creepy, walking through apartments where families once lived, bits of clothes and furniture still scattered about. It can be remarkably tranquil, walking down a once-main street with moss growing on the pavement and no sounds but the birds.
Photographing the absence of people is like photographing radiation: it is tough to show what you can't see.
I wanted to show people what the Chernobyl zone actually looks like now. I decided I needed to step outside of the usual 35mm rectangle to do it.
So this summer I have been working with web designer Dave Menninger. We've created a web page with a series of panoramas showing Chernobyl and Pripyat, the town where Chernobyl workers once lived:
http://www.blueroomdesign.net/pripyat/index.htm
We'll continue to add new panoramas to the page as we have time to work on them. Let me know what you think.
