“Chernobyl” is a document of the communities who inhabit and pass through the exclusion zone—an area covering approximately 2600 km2 around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster of 1986.

‘Chernobyl is a unique world full of contrasts—where stories of life and death intertwine and where nature is always the first to pay the price for man’s impact on planet Earth. The ‘dead zone’ of Chernobyl today is full of life, life affected and mutated by the largest and most catastrophic technological accident that humanity has ever suffered, a humanity that has no voice and has suffered all the consequences.’

The photographs in the book—the culmination of six years work for Mittica include untold stories like the stalker, groups of young Ukrainians who enter illegally in the zone, or the Hasidic Jews on pilgrimages to honour an important Hasidic dynasty which originated in Chernobyl in the XVIII Century.. Or other stories like the daily lives of the ‘samosely’ who returned to their heavily contaminated villages after being evacuated following the disaster, the story of recycling of radioactive metals, and the story of daily life of four thousand people living in Chernobyl City. Mittica also spent time in areas just outside but similarly impacted by the disaster where residents live with the devastating health effects of high levels of contamination.

‘I recounted the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster on people and the environment because this cannot and must not be forgotten. Most of the children sickened by radiation that I photographed are no longer alive today, as well as many elderly people I photographed who lived in villages in the Exclusion Zone. Only their photographs remain to remind the world of them. Radiation does not only erase people, but also the memory of a place and its history. I would like this book to be the memory of that place and those people for posterity.’

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, much of the exclusion zone has been mined. Tourists, ‘stalkers’ and pilgrims can no enter and the samosely have either been deported or live in total isolation.

‘Despite being one of the most contaminated places on Earth, the Chernobyl dead zone was full of life before the war. Today, it has truly become a zone of total exclusion. Everything mutates in the zone, not only nature, not only the human genome. With the war in Ukraine, all these stories have changed or no longer exist.’

Published by Gost Books
London, 2024
Edition of 1500
19.9 x 27.2 cm
224 pages