In the abandoned villages of the “Forbidden Zone” the evidence of families, home, culture and childhood dreams are only memories. When I saw the family of coats hung neatly on hooks for time to begin its work on decay and return to the earth I was moved to tears. Library books moist with the dampness of rot and an empty swing on the skeleton of a dead tree that was once a place of learning and play. Piles of radioactive panels from the reactor site, beautiful dressed in emerald moss, Geiger counters buzzing.
In a box in a home that may have not been entered since 1986, I found a letter. Plates still on the table, articles of clothing strewn about, the abandoned house was situated in an equally vacant village within the “Forbidden Zone,†the area that absorbed the bulk of the radioactive fallout. Like a message in a bottle from an unknown author, I came across this last testament, this letter, quietly left to rest in an empty armoire.
Overwhelmed by the profound sense of loss and humanity the words expressed the message resonated, mirroring sentiments I believed myself to hold should my home be torn from me. Most sobering about the disaster is not the moment the reactors so fortuitously went off. The immediacy and jarring nature of the event stands in stark juxtaposition to the prolonged, decaying after-effects that have so ruthlessly ravaged the land and its inhabitants.
For the inhabitants of Chernobyl the culmination of each passing day is both a triumph and a struggle as the desolation and decomposition of the city is increased with each sunset. The initial visual response to many of these photographs may be calming at times, pastoral beauty seeming serene and organic. However the invisible demon of radioactivity permeates each frame. The desperate voice I felt when I read the first translation of the found letter brought the magnitude of careless energy seeking to the most basic core of our person and family, loss of community and the basic root of home.