'chernobyl'

This was a commissioned project for Esquire Magazine (UK). It has also been published in several other countries this year, coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the disaster.

On April 26th, 1986, an explosion ripped apart a nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl Power Station. Radioactivity spread quickly across Europe, causing suffering and death to hundreds of thousands of people. 

The damaged reactor, still emitting radioactivity from within a concrete tomb that is falling apart, remains a very real danger to European countries. Despite this danger several hundred people still live and work within the exclusion zone that surrounds the nuclear plant.

Some are workers at the plant, others are elderly inhabitants allowed to return to their small farming settlements, where the land is still highly radioactive. Only Pripyat, a town just two miles from Chernobyl and once home to 47,000 people, remains permanently abandoned.