Archive July | Timm Suess

Archive for July, 2009

Chernobyl Wallpapers

Sunday, July 26th, 2009 | decay, hdr, wallpapers | 5 Comments

The last few weeks have been very successful: The Chernobyl Journal was featured on a couple of high profile sites, notably Design You Trust, Neatorama, Cult Case, and radio host Kim Komando’s Cool Site of the Day. At one point the server broke down from an amazing 14 000 visitors on one day.

Among the loads of feedback I received, one request consistently came up: Wallpapers. You want wallpapers. So here you go: I’ve prepared 4 pictures in various wallpaper formats for your desktops. › Continue reading

Tags: background, Chernobyl, desktop, photography, Pripyat, urbanexploration, wallpapers

Chernobyl Journal: Epilogue

Saturday, July 4th, 2009 | odds and ends, project wormwood, updates | 2 Comments

After three months of intense publishing, the Chernobyl Journal is now finished. In order to make it easier to read and find, I have collected all material around the trip on a special page. You will also find separate pages for pictures, videos and sounds alone.

Thank you!

My great thanks goes out to my fellow zone travellers, Beat, René and Laura, for pulling this project through – I couldn’t have done it without you. Thanks to the Chernobyl InterInform team – especially Yuriy – for the amazing tour and the freedom we had to explore the zone. Thanks to Robert for borrowing me a Geiger counter to keep us safe. Thanks to the organizers of the Pecha-Kucha Basel Night for allowing me to show my pictures. Thanks to all of you who commented, shared, corrected mistakes, translated Russian, and spread the word. And a big, big thanks to my wife, my favorite art critic, who had to bear me geeking out on Cherno-stuff week after week and still supported me and kept me sane. You’re all amazing – THANK YOU!

So, what’s next?

For now, my plan is to enjoy the summer, and concentrate on some more sound recordings (I’ve got a new microphone, which I really want to try out) . There are at least two short movies from previous locations in the making (a brewery and a potassium mine). My backlog of pictures from the last three years is still huge, so expect more decay photographs. I also might take a dip into abstract photography, because I’ve become increasingly fascinated with it.

As for my plans for the Chernobyl material, I am planning to organize an exhibition within a couple of months, and am playing with the idea of publishing part of the journal as a book. Stay tuned.

Chernobyl Journal #13: End of the Rainbow

Saturday, July 4th, 2009 | decay, hdr, travel journal, video | No Comments

This is the last part of my travel photo journal to the Chernobyl zone of exclusion. Check out the Chernobyl Journal page for the full story, all pictures, videos and sounds.

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After that short excursion, it was five o’clock – time to leave. We went back to the bus, where Tanya had fun harassing Yuriy and the driver with feedback noises from the walkie-talkies:

Sound: Walkie Talkie Feedback Galore!

We picked up Laura and René (who had lost their way in Pripyat, but found back to the main street), and drove back to Chernobyl. The last location we visited before returning to the research station was the old shipyard north of Chernobyl. The rusty boats looked beautiful in the evening sunlight. It was hard to find a good spot to shoot them without having tree branches in the way, but it was a worthwhile location to visit at the end.

› Continue reading

Tags: abandonments, Chernobyl, decay, photography, Pripyat, travel, urbanexploration

“Ghosts of Prypiat”, by Carlos Latuff

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 | artists, project wormwood | 1 Comment

Over DeviantArt, I was contacted by Carlos Latuff, a political cartoonist and photographer from Brazil. We talked about Chernobyl, and he decided to draw a special artwork based on one of my pictures from Pripyat. I feel really flattered!

Be sure to check out Latuff’s other artwork on DeviantArt, very powerful (and Creative Commons licensed)!