My topic this time was “Decadimento – Italian Decay”, where I presented urbex four locations from Northern Italy. Each of these places has its own history which I will explain another time with a full set. Enjoy!

Like skeletal structures, welcoming us to enter them, we found the large halls where once workers stacked bricks in neat rows to dry them. The long shadows pointed east, while resting on old transport machinery.

Inside the factory, the deep, cool, and somewhat scary corridors of the ovens known as ‘kiln’. We didn’t enter them, trusting that the light wasn’t strong enough to fight the sleeping ogres hidden inside.

Up the stairs, atop the kiln, a wide desert of brick dust, occasionally broken by humble columns, symmetric compartments and rows of valves, like toddlers in blue and yellow overalls. Fields of regular, rusty, hat-shaped ventilation shafts.

Next to the brickworks, a beautiful old villa, overgrown by a jungle of precious garden plants. It must have been the residence of the owner and his family.

Finally, on our way back to the car, a sturdy little plant, triumphant in her conquest over a man-made thing, looked up from her sunbath, and waved us good-bye.

And here is the full gallery:

… became …

… became …

… became …

… became …

… became …

More…

Having seen and commented so much of Dave’s work, I decided to dip my feet into abstract waters. I’d love to hear what you have to say about my first three pictures.

Exhbition homepage: “Industrieromantik” (until 14 September 2009)

Exhibition location: Ziegel Oh Lac (part of Rote Fabrik)

+++

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.

At the InterInform station we settled the bill, and Yuriy showed us a couple of radiation maps on the walls. After that, we said goodbye to him and Tanya (they were staying in the zone), and drove off south.

Contamination Control

The drive was very quiet, as most of us fell asleep from exhaustion. Half an hour later we arrived at the 30km checkpoint. All of us had to leave the van and walk through a door into a small building next to the gate. We entered a large, green painted room which was divided by what looked like subway security doors: It was the contamination checkpoint. To pass it, we had to put our feet on predefined spots, put our hands into metal boxes, and were scanned from head to toe. If you were clean, the light would turn green and the gate would open. If not, well… we were lucky we didn’t find out what would happen then. The process was fully automatic, impersonal, and looked like it was adopted straight from Half-Life’s “City 17“.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRQLzv_hmFM

My own radiation check consisted of statistics derived from my own Geiger counter. Here is what it showed:

My total radiation dosis was 3.21 + 1.9 = 5.11 uSv. That’s the equivalent of half a dosis you get from a dental x-ray. We received a multiple of that dosis from cosmic rays, travelling by plane. Of course, that’s Gamma radiation only; we don’t know what we breathed in, especially when the Pripyat ghost trucks were close.

Memories for a Lifetime

It was around eight o’clock when we arrived at the apartment. We got out of our dusty clothes, threw away our shoes, showered thoroughly, got some Italian food and spent the evening in a Kyiv live music club and at home with a bottle of Riga Balzams. It was four o’clock in the morning when we finally went to bed.

So ended our trip to Chernobyl and Pripyat. I have seen a couple of strange places in my 7 years of urban exploration: Abandoned psychiatric hospitals, coloring plants full of chemical residues, half-burnt schools and cathedral-like breweries; but nothing comes close to Pripyat. It is a truly abandoned city, the remaining memory of a place once called home by 50 000 Soviet citizens. I still have dreams about the place, its unsettling quiet and absence of life, the beeping of my Geiger counter, the passport pictures of Pripyat school children, and the ever-present radiation.

After the trip, René told me I looked like I had reached the end of my rainbow there. Maybe I did. It’s a lonely place, and the pot of gold is bitter. Maybe I will go back one day. But then, I will speak Russian.

:: The End ::

+++

Beat and I re-grouped at the van and took a break. A quick phone call to Laura and René revealed that they were still exploring Pripyat roofs, so we asked Yuriy if he could take us to the old fire station in the southwest for half an hour. The station was nothing special – a large hall for the (absent) fire trucks and some adjacent common rooms (one of them full of soft drink bottles).

On the other side of the road however was a much more interesting site: Pripyat’s old militia station, which was full of old vehicles: Cars, buses, trucks, dredgers, even a small tank BRDM-2D combat vehicle. There were further vehicles on top of the militia building, and I still have no idea how they got up there. I was initially worried that the radiation around those vehicles would be very high, as metal absorbs radioactivity better, but it wasn’t. This meant that they hadn’t been used during the accident, and all of those vehicles had been moved to the old junkyard at the border of the zone.

Photo Albums

Album: Fire Station

Album: Militia Station

Map for this Journal Entry

The Chernobyl Journal will conclude next week.

+++

Because of our group member’s different paces and interests, we were rarely at the same spot at the same time (which helped to keep people out of your pictures). At the Palace of Culture however, we all got together again. And while René and Laura were busy rising a new FC Pripyat from the ashes of the gym, and Beat was still looking for good spots to shoot, I got into a conversation with our guide who was standing in front of the van, waiting for us.

Theater

I asked Yuriy about the higher level of radiation I had measured on patches of moss. He offered to show me some, and led me around the Palace of Culture, where he first showed me a room full of Communist party member portraits. It was also the back entrance to a huge theater stage, which unfortunately was too dark to shoot. We then moved on to the Pripyat amusement park where the big ferris wheel, the bumper car and two other rides stood lonely on a large, flat field of asphalt. Yuriy showed me some radioactive moss while Beat, who had joined us, and I took some of the obvious shots around the area.

Half an hour later my phone was ringing. It was Laura, asking me where we were. Tanya had assumed that Yuriy had already driven us to the next location, and had led Laura and René west. I was worried, because the zone is not a place you want your friends to wander around without an expert on radiation. After telling Yuriy that the others where the others were waiting, he shook his head in disbelief: “I’ll be back in 10 minutes…”, he muttered and drove off, leaving Beat, myself, and the joyrides alone.

Ferris Wheel

The amusement park was an unsettling place. The ferris wheel loomed underneath a cloud-scattered sky and every few minutes gave off guttural creaking noises. The radiation levels were about 40 times as high as normal (4 uSv/h) -- not extreme, but elevated, especially if you stood on the patches moss or got close to the bumper cars. Some of the trees looked strangely deformed, spreading sideways instead of skywards. The constantly beeping sound of the Geiger counter slowly got under my skin as I started to realize how constant and inevitable the radiation and all its associated risks around me were.  According to René’s translation of Tanya’s theory, there are two kinds of people in the zone: “radiophobes” and “radioenthusiasts”. And while Yuriy and Tanya both were obvious radioenthusiasts, I was starting to feel signs of an emerging radiophobia.

When the van came back, René, Laura and Tanya got out. Then the van drove off again. René explained to us that  they had walked west shooting pictures, waiting for us. After our phone call, they were picked up by a visibly worried Yuriy. And just after they had climbed in the van, a group of 5 big, unfriendly-looking guys were turning the corner -- apparently looters on the lookout for valuables. René quoted Yuriy’s scolding: “Can you stab? Can you shoot? No? Then why the hell do you go there alone?”.

They were lucky. Apparently, the zone is a dangerous place for other reasons than just radiation.

Photo Album: Around the Amusement Park

Album: Around the Amusement Park

Video, covering journal entries #4 and 5:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghhu7M7VUjY

Map of this Journal Entry

(Chernobyl Journal continues in part six)

Photo Set: "Autumn Leaves"

Some months ago, my friend and fellow photographer Annie Bertram recommended to me to visit the  historic automobile cemetery Gürbetal near Bern. The area was originally planned as an open air museum for vintage cars from the 1940s – 1970s, but the owners (who dealt in used car parts) never realized the project. So, the car collection became a car cemetery under birch trees, which was recently used for a national art exhibition. Unfortunately, the area is now closed for environmental reasons, and its future uncertain.

My wife and I visited the cemetery in October, one day before it closed. It was an amazing autumn day, and birch leaves were covering the cars under the trees. I’m happy to present to you a photo sets called “Autumn Leaves” – it contains 34 color and 20 black & white pictures.