Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster x Photographer Taehyung AU
Imagine Taehyung has been commissioned by the government to photograph the events following the explosion of Reactor 4, and document the horrors alongside them.
Kim Taehyung had spent much of his life photographing the nature surrounding the town of Pripyat, some 50KM away from the Chernobyl powerplant. He didn’t specialise in War photography, or anything of the sort. When he was commissioned by Boris Shcherbina to document the events, he was unaware how war-like his photos would appear.
It was basically a war zone. 18 year old conscripts had been sent onto the roof of the powerplant to clear the debris. They had been warned they could only spend 90 seconds up there, for fear of acute radiation poisoning.
Taehyung has seen it. What it did to men. The skin would blister, and the organs disintegrate. It was terrifying. But in order to gain the photos he was asked for, he too had to walk upon the graphite deemed to dangerous for any organism with a DNA structure to walk upon. But he had to.
Unbeknownst to him, his photography would soon catch up to him. He had limited his life far beyond what was expected of a young healthy man like him. 5 years tops. Then cancer… Despite this, he continued to document the horrors of the liquidators day to day tasks, and had to hope that he wouldn’t die the way he had seen so many pass.
(I had been considering this aesthetic for quite some time, but I feared being insensitive. After a while I decided to do this in order to tell everyone to watch the new series Chernobyl by HBO. Learn about the disaster, remember the victims and how they are heros that saved my life, and everyone else’s life in Europe. We are forever In debt to those men who lost their lives. Valery Legasov, Boris Shcherbina, the divers, the miners, the firefighters and the 600,000 liquidators. Of these people, it is estimated between 4,000 and 94,000 have died of radiation related causes.
In memory of Volodya Shevchenko, who gave his life to make the first documentary about Chernobyl. He died 1 year after his first day in Pripyat.)
