Where's the website?

If you tried to visit my website www.mfrphoto.com lately, you've discovered that it is not there.

Gone. Vanished. Up in a cloud of pixels.

Here is what went wrong: Northwest merged with Delta. Really. That's why.

See: no NW = no more NW Visa card = new account number = failed automated billing = big electronic burp = unpaid bill = warning sent to old address = this morning, they deleted my entire website.

Even though I plunked down my electronic 59 bucks before I rushed off to the next thing (packing my bags for heart surgery), it didn't help.

Of course, they could undelete it, but I am not willing to pay their ransom. My homepage will forward here to my blog until I return to the U.S. and have time to deal with it.

open hearts

Latafit and Valekh Sulemanov try to hold back tears as they watch their daughter Parvana, age 18 months, get wheeled away for heart surgery.

I just finished my first day photographing open heart surgeries in Kharkiv for Chernobyl Children's Project International. I'll be back in the hospital for another 12 hour shift tomorrow.

I am also recording audio as I go —— both background hospital sounds and interviews —— so we can later put together a slideshow conveying this experience.

Both the ICU and the Operating Room are tough places to photograph, in different ways, emotionally and logistically. I'm working with a fabulous and dedicated team of volunteer doctors and nurses (3 surgeries back to back? in a baking hot operating room? that's dedication!). The team brought here by the International Children's Heart Foundation, will do 20+ operations in a typical 2 week mission.

Now a few hours sleep before we go do it all again.

Exhibit opening in Slavutych

Press Release - June 2, 2009 - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Inside Chernobyl: life goes on
Photography Exhibition

If you worked at Chernobyl, would you stay there?

A new photography exhibition reveals the inside of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant today, focusing on the everyday lives of nine people who still work there. Created by an American photographer and Fulbright Scholar, this exhibition honors all those who work inside the Chernobyl plant, and the city of Slavutych where they live.

Read the full press release.

Congratulations Irina and Bas!

Bas Wels and Irina Leonenko got married in a lovely ceremony at Saint Alexander Catholic church in Kyiv. I felt privileged to attend and take photos, my way of thanking Irina for all her time and invaluable help preparing my exhibit last month.

Congratulations!

media coverage of the exhibit

There was a gratifying burst of media coverage during the first week of my Inside Chernobyl exhibit in Kyiv. Here are some of my favorite stories:

• Global Comment — interview
• Russia Profile — magazine article
• Unian Photo Agency – coverage of opening
• Korrespondent magazine – photos
• Kyiv Post – exhibit preview
• Inter – TV interview (link to come)
• Gamma – TV interview (link to come)
• Uncatalogued Museum – commentary

Some other coverage:

• Afisha magazine – events guide
• The Day – article
• National Radio of Ukraine – news brief (interview audio link to come)
• UkrInform national news agency – news brief

installing my exhibit

This morning we set up my Inside Chernobyl exhibit in Shevchenko Park, in downtown Kyiv. You can see installation photos on Linda Norris's uncatalogued museum blog. Then I had a brief lull to be nervous before our very nice opening ceremony.

I am a very grateful to everyone who made this exhibit possible. I was honored to have such a group of distinguished speakers at the event.

The best part of today, for me, was seeing audience reactions. It's been a laborious 4 months to bring this exhibit from conception to completion. Today it felt worthwhile, as I watched so many passersby stop and really examine the exhibit.

After a brief pause to relax, I will post photos of the exhibit and more details.

Arriving at Chernobyl

Every weekday morning, about 3,800 Chernobyl plant workers arrive at the plant via the Semikhody train station. One former worker called the train platform "the daily fashion show." Immediately afterwards, employees enter giant locker rooms and change into their work clothes.

I love the matching red-dyed hair of these women.

In every exhibit, some favorite photos get cut. I am posting a few this week and explaining why you won't see them in the exhibit.

One section of the exhibit shows an overview of a typical day at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. This photo got cut to make room for a more essential photo at the train station, showing workers passing through the final radiation checkpoint of the day.

Inside Chernobyl

Inside Chernobyl: life goes on

My photo exhibit opens in 2 weeks. Last week, I delivered all material to the designer to lay it out. Now I can take a deep breath before I dive back into preparations.

Inevitably, in every exhibit, some favorite photos get cut because they don't support the story of the overall exhibit or are redundant with other photos.

This week I will post a few of my favorite images that did not make it into the show.

Lira Barbash is sixteen months old and entranced by feeding pigeons. She throws sunflower seeds to the birds while her mom shops in the Moscovskiy Kvartal open-air bazaar in Slavutych.

This is a lovely image, but it does not tell enough of the story of Slavutych, the city that is home to the Chernobyl plant workers. So the photo had to go, alas.

Inside Chernobyl downloads

Inside Chernobyl: life goes on
Чорнобиль зсередини: життя продовжується
Photography exhibit in Shevchenko Park, Kyiv
April 24 - May 8, 2009

The photographs here are available free for media use, for articles related to the Inside Chernobyl exhibit. For any other commercial or editorial uses, contact Michael Forster Rothbart at info@mfrphoto.com.

All published photographs should be accompanied by a credit:
Photo by Michael Forster Rothbart.

Click on any photo to get a larger version.

Caption: In Chernobyl's liquid radioactive waste treatment facility, wastewater will be purified and the remaining radioactive sediment will be safely stored in barrels. Serhiy Bokov and his colleagues are readying this new facility for operation.
Підпис: На заводі, де переробляються рідкі радіоактивні відходи, стічні води очищаються, а радіоактивний осад буде надійно зберігатись у цистернах. Сергій Боков і його колеги готують цей новий завод до експлуатації.

Caption: Morning rush hour in the H.I.R.C. department: workers undergo internal radiation control before starting their shift on the New Safe Confinement construction site near the 4th Block “Shelter Object.”
Підпис: Ранкова година пік у відділі ЦРБ: працівники проходять внутрішній радіаційний контроль перед тим, як заступити на роботу на промисловій площадці об’єкта «Укриття»

Caption: At the Chernobyl plant, more than 3,800 employees still come to work every day. Here, workers check their hands and feet for radioactive contamination one last time at the end of the day, before boarding the train home.
Підпис: На Чорнобильську атомну станцію щодня приходить на роботу більше 3800 працівників. Остання перевірка рук і ніг на радіоактивне забруднення наприкінці робочого дня, перед посадкою на електричку.

Caption: Morning with the Evteev family. Tanya Evteeva checks her work schedule while her family finishes breakfast.
Підпис: Ранок в домі Євтєєвих. Таня перевіряє розклад роботи, поки сім'я закінчує снідати.

Caption: In Slavutych, Lira Barbash is sixteen months old and entranced by feeding pigeons.
Підпис: В місті Славутич, Лірі Барбаш шістнадцять місяців і вона із захопленням годує голубів.

liquid radioactive waste

I've been too busy shooting to blog. I shot over 12,000 photos in the first 2 months of 2009. For me, that's a lot.

I've returned from a few weeks photographing at the Chernobyl plant and Slavutich, where the Chernobyl workers live. So now it is time to pay the price: this week I'm editing photos 10 hours a day.

Sergii Bokov lives in Slavutich, Ukraine, and commutes to his job at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. He is an engineer in the liquid radioactive waste treatment facility. In total, about 3,800 out of 24,300 Slavutich residents work at the Chernobyl plant.

Liquid radioactive waste? I never thought about it before either. But what do you do when you have a large site that is radioactive? When you clean the floors, where do you dump the water? When you flush the toilet? Chernobyl NPP now has separate pipe systems for the dirty zones, and all the water, with low levels of radioactive particles in it, has to be treated separately.

Control room panorama

Last time I wrote a long post about visiting Chernobyl's Control Room 4, the epicenter of the disaster. It is dark and skeletal. In contrast, here is Control Room 1.

Oleg Ryazanov is a Control Room Shift Supervisor in the Chernobyl 1st Block. His job is to sit in an empty room watching inactive machinery and make sure nothing happens. (Click photo to see larger).

Unlike the destroyed 4th Block, the other 3 reactors at Chernobyl are still functional. Although they have been shut down since 2000, they could be restarted at any time. (Theoretically. Only theoretically. If politics and world opinion did not exist.)

I am now working on a series of panoramic portraits of Chernobyl employees en milieu. The photos are equally about the people and the places they inhabit. Daily lives in this unique environment. This is Oleg Ryazanov, Chernobyl control room shift supervisor.

If the reactor was active, Oleg would oversee three other operators. As it is, he sits in an empty room and does, essentially, nothing. But it is a very important nothing, as there is still nuclear fuel in temporary storage in the reactor hall. As long as the fuel remains inside, Oleg and his peers will continue to sit in their seats all day and all night.

How long will the fuel remain? A very good question. I can tell you only this: many others have wondered the same thing.

Oleg did not work at Chernobyl at the time of the accident. He came later, "because the package on offer was good - more pay and a bigger apartment."

"I earn about 4,000 hryvnia per month [about US$500], which is quite high on the power station's pay scale. In Ukraine it is a very good salary. My job is to keep the reactor under control, to keep the water cooling system running and to monitor the spent fuel tanks."

"It's depressing. Soon my job will cease to exist. I can only do the job I was trained to do for another two years here... I don't rule out going to work abroad. People have gone from here to China and Iran. I would not go to Iran, but China is a possibility."
(Oleg interviewed by Stephen Mulvey/BBC).

Chernobyl's heart of darkness

It's a curious feeling to stand at the epicenter of a disaster. On April 26, 1986 in the middle of the night, in Control Room 4 of Chernobyl, things went wrong during a test. Very wrong. The rest is, as they say, history. Plenty of books have been written and decades of debate about what exactly went wrong and who was to blame.

But I just want to tell you about the experience of actually standing in the half-dark, half-destroyed room, dosimeters on, taking it all in.

View of Chernobyl's dark Fourth Block Control Room, where the 1986 accident began. This panorama was created by stitching together 12 photographs. (Click to see larger).

First comes anticipation. It took me two years of working on this Chernobyl documentary to get here. We got our security clearances, crossed the border twice today, and passed five different checkpoints. We put on our protective clothing. I work for an hour photographing in Control Room 1. All the time we are getting closer to Ukraine's ground zero and I wonder what will we see.

Then comes fear. Some people think I am crazy to go inside Chernobyl, but the working areas have been cleaned regularly for two decades and are no longer dangerous. So my first flicker of fear came only when we paused outside Control Room 4 to pull rubber slippers over our protective boots. How puny we are, I thought, in the face of such a monumental disaster. We are entering the enormous Sarcophagus, the shell constructed to contain the radiation. Here or anywhere, I wonder, why do we live our lives believing that we are safe from harm?

Next comes surprise. We enter. It is dark. One security light high above casts one small pool of light. My first thought is that it doesn't look real. It looks like a stage set, the house dark. Or a movie set. The bridge from Star Trek. Control Room 4 once looked similar to Control Room 1, but no longer. The first block control room is still alive: it has lights, workers, ceiling panels, a pen holder on a desk, a fridge for lunch food, office chairs with wheels. Everything has been stripped from the Fourth Block.

A central panel of the Fourth Block controls.

On the other hand, the room is not burned out. Somehow, I expected charred concrete and twisted metal. There is plenty of such debris at Chernobyl, but not here. The control room was protected by a 3-meter reinforced concrete wall. Even though there was an enormous explosion in the reactor, just 5 meters north and 15 meters below us, this room was spared. The nearby reactor hall and turbine hall remain too radioactive and unmapped to allow any visitors inside.

I'm also surpised that the control room, which I always imagined as an isolated place, now serves as a hallway for workers. The original corridor, on the other side of the reinforced wall, is too contaminated for use.

Next, a moment of panic. My rubber slipper falls off, and I suddenly feel naked. I envision the invisible radiation drilling holes through my foot. Of course, to my escorts, it is a minor matter. They tell me to simply pull it back on, reminding me to put on my gloves first. Later, they tape my boot on, mostly, I think, just to make me feel better.

Next comes a sense of solemn awe. Hundreds of thousands of lives were changed forever because of what happened in this room. More than that, the very course of world history changed. The Cold War ended because of Chernobyl. Even the Soviet Union itself ended because of Chernobyl: after the accident, people lost faith in their government, protests began, and the whole system crumbled. Like 9/11, Chernobyl marked the end of an era. Afterwards, nothing looked the same.

We look at the hole in the reactor control panel where the 3 big red emergency buttons used to be. (Yes, they really were red. But most of the buttons and controls were long since stripped during decontamination). Here, on 4/26/86 during the 41 seconds between 1:23:04 AM and 1:23:45 AM, an operator desperately hit these buttons to insert all emergency shutdown rods back into the reactor. But it was too late.

Finally comes anxiety. Time is passing quickly and I have work to do. This is a very dark and very large room, and I brought just one off-camera flash to light it, since I was advised to carry as little as possible into the dirty zone. I jump into working, leveling my plastic-wrapped tripod and directing my voice-activated light stand (AKA Sergii), and there is no longer room in my head for thinking about the implications of this space.

After we emerge, I study a model of the plant. I can't quite believe we were inside the belly of the beast. And I am also amazed how low our radiation dose was. We received just 0.007 milliSieverts of radiation during our hours inside, about what you'd get on two hours of a transatlantic flight.

Chernobyl has gotten inside my head. Although my photography mostly focuses on people, it is important to include the epicenter from which all other effects radiate. I'm grateful to have this opportunity.

During my interviews, I've realized that what Chernobyl means to people says more about them than about the disaster. Some discount it entirely. Some mourn for a paradise lost. Some fear it. Some blame it. For me, when I started, Chernobyl was a lingering danger that needed to be uncovered. And now? I'll get back to you on that.

More inauguration party photos

Each morning when I awake, I still find it hard to believe that Barack Obama is really our President. I started reading his autobiography, Dreams from My Father; I find it inspiring that we now have a leader who is a good writer, felt an early calling to do public service, and lived abroad as a child.





     By popular request, here are two dozen photos from the Kyiv Inaugural Ball. Feel free to download these photos for personal use. For other purposes, contact me.

To get high-resolution copies of these photos, email the event organizers, Democrats Abroad in Ukraine. Eventually, they will also put photos on their website.

Click on each thumbnail to see a larger version. Enjoy!

Chernobyl Control Room 1

An inactive information panel in Control Room 1 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant showed the status of all the fuel rods in the reactor pool.

The Chernobyl plant has been inactive since 2000, but it took Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) until last week to approve decommissioning. Depending on your perspective, this is either big news — because it allows for the nuclear fuel rods to be finally moved to safe storage — or unimportant, because it is just another small bureaucratic step in a 75 year clean-up process.

The day after the law passed, I had my first opportunity to visit the inside of the Chernobyl plant. Once I have time to edit and organize photos, I will post a description of a day in the life inside Chernobyl.

Yes We Did!

Ukraine celebrated the inauguration of Barack Obama with a giant formal ball in Kiev.

Ukrainian pop star Gaitana, I must say, was amazing.

Like Obama, Gaitana rocked the house. (Like Obama, she is half-African, her mother Ukrainian and her father Congolese.)

The ball was attended by hundreds of Americans and Ukrainians, plus dignitaries and diplomats from around the world. Here, some ambassador and some famous Ukrainian writer and the chair of Democrats Abroad in Ukraine all dance their hearts out.

I am not much of a celebrity-monger, but wasn't that just the Speaker of the House? Accompanied by that famous philanthropist? And there goes the Director of the National Security Council!

Obama takes an oath. Svetlana pours drinks.

Oh yeah, now and then we paused in our festivities to watch the actual historic event unfold in Washington.

As an American far from home, I simply felt proud.

[Note to my regular readers: yes, it was a bit of a shock to jump from the village where I've been photographing straight to the Hyatt Regency Kiev. Fear not, I'll be back in the village tomorrow.]

[Note to my new readers: I am processing requests for photos from the Ball as fast as I can. I'll add more photos to the blog next week and I'll send out copies of photos to those I've promised, but it may take me a week.]