Archive updates | Timm Suess

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.

Project Wormwood: A Trip to Chernobyl

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 | decay, hdr, project wormwood, reviews, updates | 6 Comments

For almost two years, I have been planning a trip to one of the most deserted places on earth – deserted in the sense of “people have lived there and left”. The place is the city of Pryptiat near Chernobyl. And it is the most radioactively polluted spot on earth.

Google Maps: Chernobyl Reactor

“Chernobyl”, which is Ukrainian, means “Wormwood” in English. Wormwood is typically known for its bitter taste and it being one of the main ingredients of absinthe. It also bears a strange biblical references to a star which, in an apocalyptic vision of John the Evangelist, fell from the sky and made the waters undrinkably bitter.

“Project Wormwood” seemed a suitable name for this project. › Continue reading

Tags: abandonments, Chernobyl, Prypiat, urban exploration, urbex

Arte Binningen is over – what a week!

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 | updates | No Comments

After six months of preparation and one intense week of exhibiting, my feature exhibit at Arte Binningen is now over. And what a week it was – I thoroughly enjoyed meeting all visitors, and was able to sell a couple of my pictures (for example to The Big Finn and his wife). Some are still available; contact me if you’re still interested.

I’m not publishing anything at the moment, but in the background, art is going on. First of all, I’m scanning my whole 35mm film negative archive with my new scanner. It’s not a very exciting process, but I get to revisit a lot of old holiday locations and re-experience some embarrassing teenage memories again…

Secondly, I’m planning a couple of urbex trips, a short one in December, and a longer (and far more planning-intense) one for next spring. This will become a topic for future posts, but nothing is set in stone yet.