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.

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.

WTF? Why would anyone want to go there?

As a photographer, my main object of interest are places where man-made order collides with natural chaos: Abandoned factories, houses, military installations, hospitals, and other human structures that have been left to die. The activity of visiting and documenting such places is known as urban exploration of abandonments. It combines elements of archeology, art and extreme sports with a strong interest in architecture and industrial history.

Back in the 19th century, families used to photograph their dead loved ones (NSFW) shortly before burying them and keep the photos as memento mori; in a way, urban explorers take similar post-mortem photographs, albeit of buildings and structures, not people.

Chernobyl and Prypiat are, from an urban exploration point of view is a unique location for several reasons:

1. The former inhabitants of the surrounding cities left the area over night, leaving most of their houses as they were;
2. A 19 kilometer exclusion zone has been erected around the power plant, letting only authorized persons entering the area;
3. Nobody is allowed to live in the area (with some exceptions) for the next couple of hundred years.

All in all, Prypiat and Chernobyl are ghost towns whose existence documents one of the most significant man-made disasters in history. It’s also an urban explorer’s dream come true; and with appropriate safety precautions not that dangerous as you might think.

The Trip

We will be a Swiss-Latvian team of four, two photographers, one journalist, and a creative director. The trip starts next week and will take us from Riga to Kiev to Chernobyl – where we will spend two days in the exclusion zone with an overnight stay at the local research station (no, not camping).

Over the next few days before heading east, I am planning to post some background on Chernobyl, the zone, the planned visits, and the dangers of visiting this place. Stay tuned.

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.