CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/26/2021

Commemorating the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster, 35 Years Later

On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the Soviet city of Pripyat, broke down. The reactor explosion and radioactive contamination combined to create one of the worst and most horrifying nuclear disasters in history—both in terms of cost and casualties. Today, thirty-five years later, we're commemorating the disaster with these photographs from Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide, the newest addition to FUEL Publishing's series of books on the profound aesthetic and cultural mysteries of the Soviet world. For this project, researcher Darmon Richter went beyond typical disaster tourist hotspots to photograph previously undocumented regions of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where he once worked as a tour guide while making illegal "stalker" forays on the sly. In his Prologue, Richter writes, "Chernobyl today is a place of greenery and life, of branches sagging under overripe fruit, and of wild animals that in the decades of our absence have begun to lose their distrust of humans. Wild foxes will eat bread from the palm of your hand, while all around, symbols of the former regime crumble beneath the burden of flowers, berries and ants. It is a place where the humble might find infinite beauty, where the curious may glimpse nature’s future order in a posthuman world…"