Chernobyl, Twenty Years - Twenty Lives

Chernobyl - Twenty Years, Twenty Lives is a photo documentary journey through the countries of the Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Latvia, Sweden, France, and UK. It follows twenty people in their daily lives nowadays and reflects on how they changed after the Chernobyl catastrophe twenty years ago on 26th April 1986.

To show the social scope of the catastrophe the twenty people were chosen from various levels of the society:
• Ordinary people (farmers, workers, and unemployed),
• Liquidators,
• Employees and Volunteers of social and environmental NGOs,
• Scientists and Physicians,
• Politicians.

Their opinions on the significance of the accident are as different as the groups that they represent. Nevertheless all the participants irrespective of their position in the society and education have an equal opportunity to express their attitudes towards the events in Chernobyl.
Download list with small descriptions about all cases in the project (pdf - 80 KB)

The project provides a further insight into the fates of the twenty people by portraying their surroundings, creating the feeling of the place where they live or work, be it the exclusion zone in the Ukraine, an Institute in the outskirts of Minsk in Belarus, the vast valley of the Klimpfjäll in Sweden or a pasture in Wales with a flock of sheep. The camera captures people in the apartments, where they live today and then travels to the villages where they used to live before the accident. We listen to the stories of the old people who yearn to go back to their wooden houses, which are still extremely radioactive and thus unsuitable for living.

The project documents the activities that different people have to undertake in order to adapt to the new reality that they have experienced after the Chernobyl disaster. Villagers in Belarus soaking their mushrooms in water with vinegar to decrease the amount of radiation in them. Samian reindeer herders who have to scan the deer meet before selling it in the super markets. A Welsh farmer, who needs to scan his sheep even when moving them from one pasture to another. We see a Belarussian professor measuring the accumulated radiation in school children in the South of Belarus.

By portraying people themselves, their environment and daily activities, the project takes up various issues, such as availability and reliability of information in the former Soviet Union and Western societies; the development of democracy and civil society after the break up of the Soviet Union; and the interplay of interests of politicians, scientific community, and the civil society.
Almost twenty years have gone by since the accident. Such time distance facilitates understanding of the events that followed the explosion and gives food for numerous debates related to the questions of society and energy politics. It is more important now than ever to tell the story from the perspective of people living with the consequences every day. Especially after a UN-report released in September 2005 stated that only 4,000 people suffered as a direct course of the accident.

The photos and stories will be used for a travelling photo exhibition which you can choose to host and at a website where essays about each person can be downloaded at a variation of languages.

It took nearly three years to create this documentary. I was in the Ukraine and Belarus for the first time in 1995 where I realised to what degree the contamination of Chernobyl affects everybody. When I in 2003 was in Belarus again I was astonished by the way the society had NOT developed. I began to get in touch with old contacts in order to create this project. In 2004 I was joined by a small group of people helping to locate a total number of twenty people to portray. The challenge was to find people from all levels of society with different points of view who at the same time would be good at expressing their thoughts.
Travelling in 2004 was tough and some of my companions reacted very strongly to the conditions of the effected areas and to the stories we encountered. Especially those in Belarus. Never the less we managed to find more than twenty interesting characters to include.

In the spring 2005 I went back to these people in order to do in-depth interviews and produce photographic documentation. Since then it has been hard work selecting the right pictures and writing stories.

Mads Eskesen,
Photographer