tak... Chernobyl Photo Log by Matt Higgins

Hyun Kyu Seo takes a trip to Ukraine to explore the life within the zone today as well as remembering the life uprooted during the disaster.

In 1986, The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, which led to evacuations, the loss of several lives, and communities buried. This book is much more than an ordinary coffee-table conversation piece if you let it, you'll have a different view on this place and these people and you might just start staring at a map, daring yourself.Tak… Chernobyl Photo Log is a poignant look at what remains today from the Chernobyl accident. The various illustrations-artistically interpreted photos and sampled graphic components by family and friends-show off this quality more readily than the photos, and they are all skillfully made, giving the book an archival feel along the lines of recent projects like the NASA Graphics Standards Manual. One in particular wins the author's affection but, and this might be the only real bad mark I have on this book, he doesn't spend quite as much time as I would've liked him to on this canine relationship.Īs a self-published work, the book is well put together and the quality of the print is very high. Don't worry, he found some doggos and they're quite healthy. Then again, maybe you're just here for the glowing green doggos. The author, through simple but adroit photography and only as much prose as necessary, sets the gargantuan scale of this teetering obsolescence. I also didn't know about the colossal antenna array said to be the main destination of the Chernobyl plant's output. He shares that humility in prose through humor that is familiar to me and certainly my particular flavor: sarcastic with an occasional bite, but always purposely to remind you that we humans aren't all that different from each other no matter the borders put around us. That assumption is very wrong, and the author takes us through his exploration of the zone and its environs with a vibrant humility, always confident in pushing ahead in discovery but never without respect for the people who remain and the precious evidence of thousands of interrupted lives.

Most of us who have seen anything about Chernobyl beyond the 1986 archive footage of steaming reactors, or recent video tours of decaying Soviet concrete, just assumed there was nothing-nobody-left save the occasional possibly radioactive dog. However, I purchased the book myself and won't be compensated.Įven though I had previously seen some of the author's photos from this trip, he clearly held back the best and most interesting for the book: those of life, human life, ordinary lives in a still extraordinary circumstance. Full disclosure: I'm a friend of the author.

Tak... Chernobyl Photo Log by Matt Higgins