Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl [Hardcover]

"Nearly 350,000 people were moved from contaminated regions of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, though hundreds of thousands still live in areas unsuitable for habitation--unsuitable not only because of radioactivity, but also because of severe socio-economic and psychological pressures. . . . With limited local capacity to deal with health, economic and environmental challenges, living conditions spiral downward." Thousands of Ukrainians would like the Chernobyl plant to reopen to provide jobs and power to the region. But the danger of the collapse of the existing structure over the "200 tons of uranium and a ton of radioactive plutonium" at Chernobyl make it a bad place to risk having more explosions so close.

The pictures are monumental, as only pictures of a catastrophe can come close to capturing the essence of the slow deterioration of nuclear decay. The picture on the cover, repeated on page 41, shows a farewell written on a red rectangle mounted on a light green wall. Very institutional colors and furnishings, but the paint on the walls is peeling, and plaster around the window fell over everything in the picture. The title of the book is written at the far edge of the ceiling:

Zones of Exclusion PRIPYAT AND CHERNOBYL.

The book is printed in Germany, and the photographer, Robert Polidori, was given the necessary visas and authorizations to enter the area around Chernobyl in Ukraine to take these pictures on June 6-9, 2001. Nearly at the end of the book, there is a picture, "Robert Polidori in the Unit 4 control room. Photograph by Konstantin Leifer, June 6, 2001." The page before that has captions for the other pictures in the book, starting with:

3-4 Sarcophagus over the Unit 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

Pages 1 and 2 are blank, and the picture of the sarcophagus on page 3 only has text on a sign just below the barbed wire at the top of a gray block wall, but the text is too small and faint to read. There is a crane between the camera and the sarcophagus which looks like a combination of toothpicks. I assume the cranes in these pictures are now too contaminated to be used elsewhere, though this book does not have any pictures of them glowing in the dark. Page 4 shows the crane from another angle, closer to the side of a structure that is almost as large as the sarcophagus.

Page 5 has the title. Page 6 shows an entryway with a sign "Contamination Control Post" in English. Page 9 shows a mall with buildings that used letters of the Russian alphabet for their signs. Trees are growing, even in the cracks in the pavement. The pictures on pages 10-11 show buildings with the nuclear power plant in the background. A lightpost on page 11 has trees close enough to hide some of the power lines in the bottom corner of the picture, but there would not be power in the line, so the trees don't need to be trimmed. Pages 12-15 show electrical transfer stations with high-voltage wires, with the nuclear power plant in the background. There are still a few guards and a STOP sign at the nuclear power plant on page 17. Page 26 is blank except for the page number because the picture on page 27 is huge, showing the Unit 4 control room in the damaged condition that fate left it in. Page 28 is blank because it marks a transition to pictures of a kindergarten classroom that has been neglected for years. There were a lot of beds in the nursery on page 33, but the mattresses are falling apart. I think the doll on page 36 might have been posed, like the chair sitting on the top of a desk near a picture of Lenin and some kids on page 37. The dangling light fixture on page 39 looks as likely to crash down as the other metal channels lying about, and they don't look they were part of the ceiling. The library on page 49 is really messed up. A lot of people left their gas masks in the cafeteria on page 53.

Then there are pictures of an abandoned hospital, vacant residential buildings, vehicles that ought to be buried, old boats in the harbor, and small pictures of little places. Trees that used to grow around the nuclear power plant are now lying in rows of piles in fields of radioactive logs. This book makes the catastrophe seem pretty recent, compared to how long people ought to wait before these areas are populated again.