It was during one of his last trips to the forbidden Zone that Guillaume Herbaut produced this series of photographs. His numerous visits, to identical looted apartments, made him realise that the only thing that remained demonstrating the residents’ presence were the remaining front doors.
I can see in front of me this snow-covered bridge, the bluish evening light and the wolf footprints. I have been in Tchernobyl’s forbidden Zone for two days. I didn’t want to come back. I had already spent too long in this place between 2009 and 2011. Four months to lose myself in this forbidden land...
Everybody knows Prypat, the ghost town, but nobody knows about Poliske, the second biggest agglomeration of the Chernobyl's forbidden zone. This city was strongly contaminated. Its evacuation didn't happen until 6 years after the catastrophe.
Strakholessie, the riviera of Chernobyl. Since some years, Strakholessie a little city located just 200 meters from the Chernobyl's forbidden zone, is becoming a new paradise for the Ukrainian nouveau riche.
Pripyat was a city of 30,000 residents, located just 3 kilometers away from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It was evacuated just one day after the nuclear catastrophe and the contamination is still very high today, so human life can not return. Pripyat is become a ghost city, where the nature grows everywhere.
After traveling a long track gnawed by water and branches, we arrive to a tiny village with ruins and bumpy ways. A slave market was here in the 13th century. The city keeps the name: Bazar. There were 2500 inhabitants in 1986, then 230 in 2005, and now 537. A slavic far west inside the Chernobyl's Zone.
Every weekend, the youth of Ivankov, the main city in the third contaminated zone in Chernobyl, meet at the Antalys discotheque.
Twenty-four years after the disaster, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the burial grounds of military equipments in Ukraine are now being pillaged. Each week, more than two hundred tons of radioactive metal are leaving the exclusion zone.
April 26, 1986: Block N° 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power station explodes. A 30 kilometre zone around the reactor is evacuated, including Pripiat, the city built to house the power station's workforce. To rehouse the population, the Soviet government decided to build a new town 60 kilometres away: Slavoutich.
