Home
As the picture fades away the surrounding environment consumes the human presence. The two images making up this piece were taken within the same building, an apartment block, together you get a sense of both occupant and environment and how they ebb out of existence like echoes rebounding from walls weakening with each reverberation, with each passing day the call of human presence becomes quieter, like fading ink from a photograph.
Maria Ivanovna
Together the two figures make a scene, an old woman sitting quietly with her cat as the echoes of devastation run through them. All that exist within the exclusion zone fall into the shadow of the disaster and yet a day-to-day persists as if adjacent to the impact of radiation, yet its effects are evident through the sickness and poverty of the occupiers.
Lost Memories
The stripping of lives becomes most evident when looking upon the toys of children in such decadent states, overlaid against an environment clearly in ruin, Chernobyl’s contemporary form. The images collate with one another by inferring to the lives, which were haltered and stripped from the space.
Post-Box
In life we are surrounded by objects through, which we casually interact and as such act as a marker of time. A mailbox maybe interacted with once a day by its owner and as such that interaction is one mark.
This mailbox humanizes the space as something, which every occupant would of passed or interacted with everyday without consideration. It in essence tells a silent story of the day-to-day, the passage of time now frozen through absence. At which point a different story is told, one of wind, rain, hot and cold.
Island in the Chaos
In a cupboard I found peace amongst the chaos, a shelf untouched except for by the layers of dust gently building over each surface. Spaces such as this seldom appear in Pripyat. They are tucked away in cupboards or under stages, these are places, which have been left on evacuation, obscured from the elements and attaining a level of self-preservation, which the rest of Pripyat could never attain.
All other spaces are stripping themselves through wind, rain and interaction, yet in these pockets a stillness is found, holding a sense of a frozen moment that if not for the dust, could have been left yesterday, acting as a physical photo for the spaces true identity.
I realised at the exhibition that "Home" had printed much darker than anticipated, I have now amended this image.
