Matthias Bruggmann: Chernobyl

Swiss Photographer Matthias Bruggmann has delivered this look back at Chernobyl, which he visited in September 2005. Another Chernobyl series by photographer Chebotayev Dmitrii can also be found here.

Bruggmann's Intro: Traveling to Chernobyl, one is faced not only with the meltdown of a nuclear reactor, but with the meltdown of a civilization.The architectural referents are common to those of post-war europe, the building blocks of Prypiat feel eerily similar to the French Banlieue. For example, the desks covered in moss from the abandoned schools are those that you would have found anywhere on the Continent. The basketball courts and the wooden structure in the gym hall are the same as those in the gym halls anywhere else.One is soon faced with the terrible, and beautiful toxicity of an environment that is incredibly familiar, and, in a sense, a warning of what could be the end-result of western civilization: a nuclear wasteland, whose silence is broken only by the birds conversing with the radiation meter of the occasional visitor.Every village has its statue to the war dead. Here, it is always the same. The artificial flowers left by the evacuees to another bygone era have kept some of their color - manufactured memories, a grim reminder of the more than five (some say more than ten) million Ukrainian dead (If the high estimate is correct, that is almost a seventy-five times the relative casualty rate in the United States, twenty times that in France, and more than twice that in Germany.)Prypiat has been stripped of the aluminum frames in the windows and there are boxes of gas masks, gutted for their silver, on the ground in the schools. A bit further down the river, the sarcophagus is slowly oozing into the rest of the world. Its deadly load will, if no action is taken, hit the phreatic surface, and inevitably reach the seas. Or it could cave in and send more debris flying into the air. Maybe it could be used as a dirty bomb - giving something more displaced, deformed, sick and haunted to a world that, all things considered, seems to have done little but profit from the mutation of the finches.