{"id":9678,"date":"2011-07-15T02:32:01","date_gmt":"2011-07-15T01:32:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=9678"},"modified":"2022-03-01T12:27:16","modified_gmt":"2022-03-01T12:27:16","slug":"chernobylszone-of-alienation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2011\/07\/15\/chernobylszone-of-alienation\/","title":{"rendered":"Chernobyl’s zone of alienation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"prypiat.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Chernobyl\/Pripyat (2011) by Paul Curry.<\/em><\/p>\n

Everyone’s favourite irradiated town,\u00a0Pripyat in Ukraine, has been in the news again now that twenty-five years have passed since the the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. This photo of the area<\/a> by Paul Curry is part of a panorama (with the nuclear plant in the distance) taken from a rootop on a clear day. Most photos of the site show the now-familiar abandoned buildings, empty playgrounds and so on; Curry’s view taken on 29th May this year is remarkable for showing how overgrown the place has become.<\/p>\n

Chernobyl has become indelibly twinned with Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterwork of grimy science fiction, Stalker<\/em><\/a> (1979), and the novel upon which the film was based, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic<\/em>, a mesh of connections I explored in an earlier post<\/a>. Darren Nisbett’s series of photos<\/a> currently showing at the Rhubarb and Custard gallery, Berkshire, are good examples of how Stalker<\/em>-like the place is now looking. Nisbett calls his series, many of which are infra-red views, Chernobyl’s Zone of Alienation<\/em> although there’s no indication of whether he’s alluding to the hazardous Strugatsky\/Tarkovsky “Zone”. The photos are on display until the end of this month, and the prints are for sale. The Independent<\/em> has a gallery feature about the exhibition here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/strong> Simon Sellars from Ballardian<\/a> alerts me to this blog<\/a> which is currently running reports from a visit to the Chernobyl exclusion zone.<\/p>\n

Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side Of \u201cStalker\u201d<\/a>
\n\u2022 The slow death of modernism<\/a>
\n\u2022 The Stalker meme<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chernobyl\/Pripyat (2011) by Paul Curry. Everyone’s favourite irradiated town,\u00a0Pripyat in Ukraine, has been in the news again now that twenty-five years have passed since the the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. This photo of the area by Paul Curry is part of a panorama (with the nuclear plant in the distance) taken from a rootop on a … Continue reading “Chernobyl’s zone of alienation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,42,7,12,20],"tags":[214,792,2725,2724,1936,1333],"class_list":["post-9678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-books","category-film","category-photography","category-science-fiction","tag-andrei-tarkovsky","tag-ballardian","tag-darren-nisbett","tag-paul-curry","tag-simon-sellars","tag-stalker"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-2w6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9678\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}