Chernobyl

Chernobyl by photographer Pierpaolo Mittica is a document of the communities who inhabit and pass through the exclusion zone--an area covering approximately 2600 km2 around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster of 1986.

Mittica first journeyed to Chernobyl in 2002, drawn like many to photograph the impact of the worst technological catastrophe of the modern era. He returned many times and rather than focusing on the ruins and relics, sought to tell the stories of those he encountered in this unique place.

Pierpaolo Mittica (b. 1971) lives and works in Italy. He graduated from the Masters Program studing conservation, technique and history of photography at CRAF in Italy 1990. His photographs have been exhibited internationally are held in collections including the Chernobyl National Museum, Ukraine; Fotografiska Museum, Sweden and J. Paul Getty Museum, USA. His photographs have been published in l’Espresso, Internazionale, Vogue Italia, Corriere della Sera, Repubblica, Il Sole 24 ore, Oggi, Vanity Fair, The Telegraph, The Guardian, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Spiegel, Die Zeit, Wired USA, Asian Geo, China Newsweek, and National Geographic amongst others. He is co-author with Alessandro Tesei and Michele Marcolin of two documentary films: Living Toxic, Russia (Sydonia, 2014) and Behind the Urals (Mondo in Cammino, 2015) and he co-directed with Alessandro Tesei the documentary film The Zone, Road to Chernobyl (Subwaylab 2018). Chernobyl is his eighth monograph.