Workers at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant pass through a radiation checkpoint © Michael Forster Rothbart Photography
“Inside Chernobyl,” an exhibition by photographer and Fulbright scholar Michael Forster Rothbart, recently made its debut in Kyiv, and will be making its way to such places as Moscow and Washington D.C.
Forster Rothbart’s undertaking is quite unexpected, standing in contrast to the usual Chernobyl fare; under the subtitle of “life goes on,” he tells the stories of ordinary Ukrainians who still work at the infamous Chernobyl nuclear plant, as well as the families they come home to every day.
Curious about his premise, I chatted with Forster Rothbart about the exhibition, his subjects and the ongoing narrative that is Chernobyl.
First of all, how did such an unusual project come about?
I came to Ukraine for the first time in 2007; my wife was doing research for her dissertation at the time. I was here for four months, and that’s when I first got started. I had studied previous photographic work on Chernobyl, and so I was prepared to see mutations, birth defects and people dying of cancer. You know, the usual stuff. That’s the world’s image of Chernobyl but it’s not the reality. What intrigues me are all the normal people in the region who are simply living their lives — farming the land or going to work at the Chernobyl plant. They didn’t move away, they stayed behind. The plant workers are now doing important work to ensure that there won’t be future contamination.
I am fascinated by the human consequences of environmental problems. Journalists cover environmental disasters as breaking news, and then they get filed away, but the repercussions continue. It’s important to look at Chernobyl a generation later. There are health effects that come directly from radiation, but then there are secondary effects that occur when people are relocated or lose family members or lose jobs. All of these social problems are more serious than health problems.
Really? More serious than health problems?
