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A Visual Geography of Chernobyl: Double Exposure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2014

Thom Davies
Thom Davies*
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
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Abstract

This article investigates the memories and lived experiences of those who dwell in the deindustrial landscape of Chernobyl in north Ukraine. Taking a visual approach to an invisible issue, the article explores the use of photography as a research tool to examine the ‘hidden spaces of everyday life’ in the shadow of Chernobyl.1 The article finds that many people have suffered a ‘double exposure’: once from radiation and then again from the failures of the Ukrainian state. While these communities are exposed as “bare life”2 to the risk of nuclear pollution, they also contest official conceptions of radiation through local knowledge, shared memory, and informal activity. The article interrogates the complex ways people perceive, negotiate, and come to terms with the ever-present but unseen menace of radiation. Through these memories, images, and lived experiences of the marginalized, we can begin to make the invisible threat of radiation appear more tangible. Finally, the article provides a short discussion about the use of participant photography in researching the invisible.

Type
Crumbling Cultures: Deindustrialization, Class, and Memory
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 84: Crumbling Cultures: Deindustrialization, Class, and Memory , Fall 2013 , pp. 116 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2013 

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References

NOTES

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2. Giorgio Agamben's notion of ‘bare life’ is germane when describing Ukrainian citizens whose bodies have been exposed to radiation without adequate state protection or compensation. Like the antiquarian figure of ‘Homo Sacer’ which inspired Agamben, these exposed and neglected populations have been denied legal status by the state, producing irradiated bodies that “cannot be sacrificed yet may, nevertheless, be killed”. See Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. (Stanford, CA, 1998), 10Google Scholar.

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8. As discussed later, the fence prevents neither radiation nor people and goods from moving in and out of the Zone. For more information on how the various Zones were decided upon, see Smith, Jim and Beresford, Nicholas Chernobyl: Catastrophe and Consequences (London, 2005), 24Google Scholar.

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81. Sasha, who was a liquidator, died last year. This research would not have been the same without his help.