SHADOWS OF WORMWOOD
"And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp,
and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters;
And the name of the star is called Wormwood:
and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.
The Holy Bible
Rev 8:10-11
Rev 8:10-11
I don't remember exactly the night of the disaster on the 26th of April, 1986 because I was only three years old but I've been watching the consequences of this tragedy all my life till nowadays. My first visit to the Chernobyl Zone was in April, 2008. From that time I’ve understood that the Zone is not the dead place that is just fenced. I've been photographing the Chernobyl Zone for eight years. For me Exclusion Zone is some kind of mystery land, where every inch is full of suffering and sorrow. Nykolay Yakushyn, a priest of Yllynskaya Church, the only working church in Chernobyl, said - "If you don't respect the Zone it'll definitely kill you but if your heart is full of love and sympathy to it and people who suffered and died here, the Zone will not touch you."
I went to the Zone a lot of times and every time I met people who lived in the Zone or close to the fence of the Exclusion Zone, I asked them the same question – If they were afraid of radiation? Why and how did they live in those places?
This project is a personal discovery of my fears and horrible things that my parents frightened me in my childhood. All our generation is some kind of aftermath of the Chernobyl tragedy, because we grew up with Chernobyl in our mind and consciousness. It is also about nature and people that live in the Exclusion Zone and in the villages close to the fence. In this terrible example we can see how easy it is to ruin everything and lose the balance of our life.