Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide

Hyperallergic

Hrag Vartanian

In Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide, Richter shares glimpses of the incredible access he had to a site that continues to send chills down the spine of people around the world.

author of Midnight in Chernobyl

Adam Higginbotham

In Chernobyl: A Stalkers' Guide, Darmon Richter—an expert in Soviet architecture who has spent years photographing and gathering information about the buildings and monuments of the former USSR—tells the amazing story of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone from the inside.Combining his evocative imagery with a series of acute and well-researched essays, Richter takes us beyond the now-familiar iconography of the abandoned city of Pripyat, into untracked reaches of the Zone—and inside the abandoned power plant itself—to unravel the myths of Chernobyl and reveal rarely-seen glimpses of the radioactive lost world and the men and women who live and work there.'

author of The Last London

Ian Sinclair

The book design lives up to the ambitions of the original film. Histories and topographies I thought I knew revealed from another angle. It's good to have the script and the images, and the book-smell the film can't deliver

author of Explore Everything and Bunker

Bradley Garrett

Richter’s evocative, theoretically astute, and beautifully illustrated account of The Zone is drawn from a rich wellspring of passion and adventure. The depth of historical research, backed up by on-the-ground experience, makes A Stalkers’ Guide a one-of-a-kind contribution to the Chernobyl archive. No other author has achieved such a comprehensive investigation of the Exclusion Zone

Financial Times

Edwin Heathcote

An eerie record of disaster, absence, the power of nature and frozen time.

Globe and Mail

Nathalie Atkinson

The latest in a continuing series about retro Soviet architecture and industrial design goes deep into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and the nuclear power plant itself. Rare and exclusive photographs of the desolate site and ghostly abandoned cities, plus interviews with survivors, balance curiosity with solemnity.

Radio Free Europe

Amos Chapple

Richter says his hope for the project is that “by putting faces to the names of these lost villages, it might help to encourage people to think of the Chernobyl region as more than just the place where a power plant blew up in 1986.”

Lit Hub

Darmon Richter

A tremendous sense of freedom—a vast and complex terrain stretches...where nature thrives untamed, and those who remain submit themselves to its mercy. Strange utopian art from the old regime lies waiting to be discovered beneath the trees and steel giants—towering technological wonders of the Cold War era—rise up like rusted guardians over this timeless no-man’s land.

InsideHook

Tobias Carroll

As methods of urban revival go, it’s an especially surreal one

Telegraph

Darmon Richter writes in his absorbing Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide, "time seems to work differently." He has seen "monuments collapse, murals disintegrate." Chernobyl today is "a place of greenery and life...foxes will eat bread from the palm of your hand, while all around ponderous symbols of a former regime give way to flowers, berries and ants."

Unherd

Daniel Kalder

Darmon Richter chafes against the rigid, schematized approach to experiencing the Zone that has emerged in recent years, and goes as deep into its forests and abandoned settlements as anybody is ever likely to. Richly illustrated with scores of photographs, it is a document of obsession, describing trips undertaken over the years since he first visited as a tourist in 2013. Starting in 2016 he began offering guided tours himself, and over the next four years took over one hundred visitors along routes that went beyond the usual sites to provide deeper insight into life in the area, with a focus on “village life and tradition, public art (murals, mosaics and monuments), and overlooked works of architecture”.

Strelka

Richter ventured deep into the irradiated forests of Chernobyl and documented what perhaps is the most striking illustration of the Anthropocene—the ruins of infrastructures and ghost towns reminding of Soviet-era utopianism, the belief in progress, and new ecologies formed in the space abandoned by humans. In his book, he combines photographs of rare discoveries made in parts of the Zone rarely visited by tourists, and the numerous accounts of those who witnessed history—engineers, scientists, police, and evacuees.