"Life In No-Man's Land" has been issued.
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Twenty-one years after the worst nuclear accident in history, the Chernobyl area tries to survive. For the world, the accident, remains in everyone’s memory. For Chernobyl, everyone tries to survive in the memory of life before.
The city of Prypiat, 3 Km from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, once had 45.000 inhabitants. Today, it is a phantom city. On April 26, 1986, the No. 4 reactor of the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant exploded, releasing hundreds of times the radioactivity of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Today, more than two decades later, it’s as though everything around Chernobyl still waits for someone or something to come and revive it: the objects, the streets, the buildings... the life that used to be there. The silence is awesome. Yet one can almost hear the silent screams of life that hopes to come to terms with death—or come back to life again.
About 350 people still live inside the Exclusion Zone, the prohibited area that everyone imagines as a horrible, dead landscape since images of the Chernobyl disaster traveled the world. For the elderly, this is the promissed land, the land from which they were once forced to move and to which they soon returned. Residents say, “All our beloved ones, our friends, neighbors, who left are dead. And look at us.” Plenty of life. They love the land they walk upon, the land they take care of. They were born there, and they will die there.
People still suffer the consequences of the 1986 catastrophe. There are children whose parents were liquidators, 'patriots' or 'volunteers' who were told by the government (Soviet at that time) to go to the Zone and work, to help their country. They couldn't say no. Today, many of their children are born with handicaps and ailments that almost no one in the scientific community wants to blame on Chernobyl. But no one wants to say the opposite either.
Here, these pictures are a trip through Chernobyl today—how it is, who the people are. The main characters, the victims. The ones who live in that no man's land. They are the heart of the matter. They are life, stemming from death.
CHERNOBYL|LIFE IN NO-MAN'S LAND - all images and text are copyrighted to Lourdes Segade
