Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T00:10:53.413Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Visual Geography of Chernobyl: Double Exposure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2014

Thom Davies
Thom Davies*
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1. de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA, 1984), 93Google Scholar.

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.

3. Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others (London, 2003), 21Google Scholar.

4. “Liquidator” is the term used to describe the people who worked in highly contaminated regions near Chernobyl as part of the “clean up” process. An estimated 700,000 liquidators were involved, including fire fighters, miners, drivers, doctors, plant workers, and military personnel from all over the Soviet Union. See Smirnova, Lyudmila and Edelstein, Michael, “Chernobyl: A Liquidator's Story,” Research in Social Problems and Public Policy 14 (2007): 361–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Soviet authorities attributed only thirty-one deaths to be the result of the Chernobyl accident, most of them the fire fighters who initially attended the scene.

6. Massey, Doreen, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis, MN, 1994)Google Scholar.

7. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is an area of prohibited territory in northern Ukraine, around the same size as Greater London. The space is controlled by border guards and surrounded by a six-foot barbed-wire fence. Special permission is needed to enter the Zone, although several hundred returnees (samoseli) live inside the Zone with semi-legal status.

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.

9. Rose, Gillian, “On the Need to Ask: How Exactly is Geography ‘Visual’?” Antipode 35 (2004): 2012–22Google Scholar; Schlottmann, Anne and Miggelbrink, Judith, “Visual Geographies—an Editorial,” Social Geography 4 (2009): 1–11 Google Scholar; Oldrup, Helen and Agervig, Trine, “Producing Geographical Knowledge Through Visual Methods,” Geografiska Annaler B 94 (2012): 223–37Google Scholar.

10. Still highly contested, the death toll from Chernobyl is difficult to accurately determine for a variety of epidemiological reasons. The IAEA's latest estimate puts it at a conservative figure of four thousand, compared to a range of other reports that place the figure nearer one million. For varying accounts, see IAEA, “Statement to International Conference on Chernobyl: Twenty-Five Years On—Safety for the Future,” (Kyiv, April 2011). http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/statements/2011/amsp2011n010.html (Accessed on 4/29/2013); and Yablokov, Alexey, Nesterenko, Vassily, and Nesterenko, Alexey, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment (New York, 2009)Google ScholarPubMed.

11. In late 2010, the Ukrainian state removed direct mention of Chernobyl from the previously named “Ministry of Ukraine in emergencies and affairs in protection of population from the consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe.”

12. Stone, Phillip, “Dark Tourism, Heterotopias and Post-Apocalyptic Places: The Case of Chernobyl,” in Dark Tourism and Place Identity, ed. White, Leanne and Frew, Elspeth (New York, 2013)Google Scholar.

13. Agamben, Giorgio, State of Exception (London, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. Agamben, Homo Sacer.

15. Ibid., 10.

16. Profeta, Barbara, Rechel, Bernd, Moshennikovab, Svetlana, Kolyado, Igor, Robertus, Yurij, and McKee, Martin, “Perceptions of Risk in the Post-Soviet World: A Qualitative Study of Responses to Falling Rockets in the Altai Region of Siberia,” Health, Risk, and Society 12 (2010): 409–24, 412CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.

18. Lefebvre, Henri, Everyday Life in the Modern World (New Brunswick, 1971)Google Scholar.

19. For an example of how this conceptual framework has been applied to post-Soviet everyday life, see Round, John, “Marginalized for a Lifetime. The Everyday Experiences of Gulag Survivors in Post-Soviet Magadan,” Geografiska Annaler B 88 (2006): 15–34 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93.

21. Yablokov, Alexey, Nesterenko, Vassily, and Nesterenko, Alexey, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment (New York, 2009), 1Google Scholar; also see Conquest, Robert, Chernobyl: Insight from the Inside (Berlin, 1991)Google Scholar; Petryna, Andrina, “Sarcophagus: Chernobyl in Historical Light,” Cultural Anthropology 10 (1995): 196–220 Google Scholar.

22. Phillips, Sarah, “Chernobyl's Sixth Sense: The Symbolism of an Ever Present Awareness,” Anthropology and Humanism 29 (2009): 159Google Scholar.

23. Gillian Rose, Family Photographs and Domestic Spacings: A Case Study. See also Chambers, Deborah, “Family as Place: Family Photograph Albums and the Domestication of Public and Private Space” in Picturing Place, eds. Schwartz, John and Ryan, James (London, 2003)Google Scholar.

24. Gillian Rose, Family Photographs and Domestic Spacings: A Case Study.

25. Holst-Warhaft, Gail, “Remembering the Dead: Laments and Photographs,” Mourning and Memory 25 (2005): 152–60Google Scholar.

26. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 107.

27. Holst-Warhaft, “Remembering the Dead.”

28. Sontag, On Photography, 41.

29. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others.

30. Agamben, Homo Sacer.

31. For a short discussion of “Chernobyl as War,” see Sergei Mirnyi, Chernobyl, Liquidator's Health as Psycho-Social Trauma (2001); Phillips, Sarah, “Chernobyl's Sixth Sense: The Symbolism of an Ever Present Awareness,” Anthropology and Humanism 29 (2009): 164Google Scholar; Kasperski, Tatiana, “Chernobyl's Aftermath in Political Symbols, Monuments and Rituals: Remembering the Disaster in Belarus,” Anthropology of East Europe Review 30 (2012): 82–99 Google Scholar; Arndt, Melanie, “Memories, Commemorations, and Representations of Chernobyl: Introduction,” Anthropology of East Europe Review 30 (2012): 1–12 Google Scholar.

32. In the city of Slavutich, which was specifically constructed to house some of the displaced Chernobyl workers, an organization of liquidators named itself “Afgantsy Chernobylia.” Melanie Arndt, “Memories, Commemorations, and Representations of Chernobyl: Introduction,” 5.

33. Sarah Phillips, “Chernobyl's Sixth Sense,” 164.

34. Brown, Kate, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cultures, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York, 2013), 308Google Scholar.

35. Cowie, Jefferson and Heathcott, Joseph, Beyond the Ruins: the Meanings of Deindustrialization (Ithaca, NY, 2003), 6Google Scholar.

36. Yurchak, Alexei, Everything was Forever Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006), 4Google Scholar.

37. Cowie and Heathcott, Beyond the Ruins.

38. Phillip Stone, “Dark Tourism, Heterotopias and Post-Apocalyptic Places: The Case of Chernobyl.”

39. Strangleman, Tim, “‘Smokestack Nostalgia’, ‘Ruin Porn’ or Working-Class Obituary: The Role and Meaning of Deindustrial Culture,” International Labor and Working Class History 84 (2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40. Sontag, Susan, On Photography (London, 1977), 67Google Scholar.

41. Sontag, On Photography, 22.

42. Petryna, Andrina, “Sarcophagus: Chernobyl in Historical Light,” Cultural Anthropology 10 (1995): 196–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43. Stone, “Dark Tourism,” 12.

44. John Patrick Leary, “Detroitism,” Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics (2011), cited in Millington, Nate, “Post-Industrial Imaginaries: Nature, Representation and Ruin in Detroit, Michigan,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37 (2013): 280CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45. Roberts, Elizabeth, “Family Photographs: Memories, Narratives, Place,” 91–108, in Geography and Memory: Explorations in Identity, Place and Becoming, ed. Jones, Owain and Garde-Hansen, Joanne (London, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46. Petryna, Adriana, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl (Princeton, 2002)Google Scholar.

47. Ibid., 64.

48. Ibid.

49. Phillips, Sarah, “Half-Lives and Healthy Bodies: Discourses on Contaminated Food and Healing in Post-Chernobyl Ukraine,” Food and Foodways 10 (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50. For a discussion of the lived realities of marginalization in Ukraine, see Round, John and Williams, Colin, “Coping with the Social Costs of ‘Transition’: Everyday Life in Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine,” European and Regional Studies 17 (2010): 183–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51. Velikonja, Mitja, “Lost in Transition: Nostalgia for Socialism in Post-Socialist Countries,” Memory Studies 1 (2012): 462–78Google Scholar.

52. Winter, Jay, “Performing the Past: Memory, History, Identity,” in Performing the Past: Memory, History, Identity in Modern Europe, ed. Tilmans, Karin, Vree, Frank Van, and Winter, Jay (Amsterdam, 2010), 12Google Scholar.

53. Phillips, “Chernobyl's Sixth Sense.”

54. Friedriksen, Stale, “Diseases Are Invisible,” Med Humanities 28 (2002): 71–73 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55. Philo, Chris, “The Birth of the Clinic: An Unknown Work of Medical Geography,” Area 32 (2000): 11–19 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56. Peterson, Alan and Bunton, Robert, Foucault, Health and Medicine (London, 1997), 35Google Scholar. For a deeper exploration of the power of the “gaze,” see Foucault, Michel, The Birth of the Clinic (London, 1973)Google Scholar and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977), and Foucault, Michel, “The Eye of Power” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Intreviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Gordon, C. (New York, 1980)Google Scholar.

57. Kuchinskaya, Olga, “Articulating the Signs of Danger: Lay-Experiences of Post-Chernobyl Radiation Risks and Effects,” Public Understanding of Science 1 (2010): 1–17 Google Scholar.

58. Bourdieu, Pierre, “The Scholastic Point of View,” Cultural Anthropology 5 (1990): 380–391, 382CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59. Foucault, “The Eye of Power.”

60. Kuchinskaya, Olga, “Twice Invisible: Formal Representations of Radiation Danger,” Social Studies of Science 43 (2012)Google Scholar.

61. Hecht, Gabrielle, “The Work of Invisibility: Radiation Hazards and Occupational Health in South African Uranium Production,” International Labor and Working-Class History 81 (2012): 94–113 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62. Ibid., 96.

63. Kesminiene, Ausrele, Evrard, Anne-Sophie, Ivanov, Viktor, Malakhova, Irina, and Kurtinaitise, Juozas, “Risk of Thyroid Cancer among Chernobyl Liquidators,” Radiation Research 178 (2012): 425–36CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

64. Mirnyi, Sergii, Worse Than Radiation and Seven Odd Chernobyl Stories (Budapest, 2001)Google Scholar.

65. Hecht, “The Work of Invisibility,” 95.

66. For more on how photography can be seen as a “performance,” and for a critical discussion of the limits of visual ethnography, see Holm, Gunilla, “Photography as a Performance,” Qualitative Social Research 9 (2008): 1–21 Google Scholar.

67. Rose, Gillian, “On the Need to Ask: How Exactly is Geography ‘Visual’?” Antipode 35 (2004): 2012–22Google Scholar; Schlottmann, Anne and Miggelbrink, Judith, “Visual Geographies—an Editorial,” Social Geography 4 (2009): 1–11 Google Scholar; Oldrup, Helen and Agervig, Trine, “Producing Geographical Knowledge Through Visual Methods,” Geografiska Annaler B 94 (2012): 223–37Google Scholar.

68. For an example and a critical discussion of using this technique, see Oh, Su-Ann, “Photofriend: Creating Visual Ethnography with Refugee Children,” Area 44 (2012): 282–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69. Newman, S., Maurer, D., Jackson, A., Saxon, M., Jones, R., and Reese, G., “Gathering the Evidence: Photovoice as a Tool for Disability Advocacy,” Progress in Community Health Partnership 3 (2009): 139–44CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

70. Green, Eric and Kloos, Bret, “Facilitating Youth Participation in a Context of Forced Migration: A Photovoice Project,” Northern Uganda Journal of Refugee Studies 22 (2009) 460–482 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71. Oh, “Photofriend.”, 283.

72. Sontag, On Photography, 13.

73. Oh, “Photofriend.”

74. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93.

75. Phillips, Sarah, “Half-Lives and Healthy Bodies: Discourses on ‘Contaminated’ Food and Healing in Post-Chernobyl Ukraine,” in The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating, ed. Watson, James and Caldwell, Melissa (Oxford, 2005), 286–98Google Scholar.

76. Doty, Roxanne Lynn, “Bare Life: Border Crossing Death and Spaces of Moral Alibi,” Environment Planning D 29 (2011): 610CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 21.

78. For the full Winogrand interview, see Diamonstein, Barbara, Visions and Images: American Photographers on Photography, Interviews with Photographers (New York, 1982), 181Google Scholar.

79. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others.

80. Doty, Roxanne Lynn, “Bare Life: Border Crossing Death and Spaces of Moral Alibi,” Environment Planning D 29 (2011): 610CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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