On April 26, 1986, technicians and engineers at the Chernobyl atomic power plant (town north of Ukraine) were doing a safety test in the reactor No. 4. The idea was to see where the reactor could stand in the event of a power failure. Or rather, if the cooling of the reactor would be sustained. What happened was not expected: The preparations of tests destabilized the reactor, but the engineer on duty and the chief engineer decided to go ahead. The result of this irresponsibility, the largest nuclear accident in history, still reflects more than twenty years later.

Cover Zones of exclusio - Pripyat and Chernobyl by Robert Polidori

It is this reverberation that was transformed into images by large-format camera the Canadian photographer Robert Polidori, and brought to light in this stunning book Zones of Exclusion - Chernobyl and Pripyat, 2003. Work with class equal to its Havana, published by the same publisher, Steidl. In 1967, when he was only 17 years, Gerhard Steidel started working as a designer and printer and in 1972 published the first book by its publisher, Befragung zur documents (or "Questioning the Documents").

Pripyat is the city next to Chernobyl where they lived most of the people who worked or were dependent on the plant to live. Entire area within a radius of 30 km had to be evacuated and the area was called "exclusion zone". Except a few people who control what was left of the plant (the last reactor was shut down in 2000), only the elderly were given permission (official) returning to their homes, or what's left of them.

Photo: Robert Polidori

After the accident, authorities transported the residents to Slavutych, a town 45 km from Pripyat. There were also scientists and plant workers. Even today the city is controlled by guards in its urban perimeter. In 2005 it had about 25,000 inhabitants. In January 2009, Viktor Yushchenko, Ukrainian President, Alexander Lukashenko, President of Belarus (Belarus) signed an agreement to facilitate the movement of experts, including foreigners, between the city and the new power plant at Chernobyl.

Polidori's images, produced in May 2001, are of a technical finesse that, together with the almost unimaginable reality, they become close to what would be a "constructed reality", to use a term of analysis. The difference this photographer to others such as Jeff Wall and Philip-Lorca di Corcia, is that Polidori created nothing, did not think anything, did not use any casting. His images are true and each page are more disconcerting because of the magnitude of the event.

Shortly after the Chernobyl reactor has become unstable, basic engineering deficiencies and actions hindered the operators led to an explosion, followed by a wave radiation. Another explosion took to the air the roof of the building of the plant. Fuel and pieces of the structure on fire created multiple fires. Large particles fell in the neighborhood and won a radioactive cloud the atmosphere and was carried by the wind, spreading across Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and elsewhere in Europe.

Photographs by Polidori confronts the reader on every page, wondering what the price of seeking this technology. Are schools where the chairs and bookshelves are crowded, standing out of the peeling walls that differentiate a common drop. The remains of buildings spread across the lawns and the woods around them, remembering the threat which also affects the nature.

Photo: Robert Polidori

Hospitals ghosts of your photos (which even us back to reality in many cities brasilerias neglected by the government) seem to be more recent, as we have seen rare footage of the attacks in Iraq. The "exclusion" of the images of those far Polidori is often sweetened and mounted that to the reader unaware - or for those who do fall - simulate a nonexistent reality.

The absence of human presence in most images is that confronts us with something much larger and more complex - and more desperate. Although sometimes it seems that we see a body on the next page, as the good images of photojournalists like James Nachtwey, Alexandra Boulat (1962-2007), Ron Haviv and Antonin Kratochvil.

The few people who appear are the technicians who were taking care of the "sarcophagus", a concrete structure that buried plutonium with radioactive waste and scrap metal, including a huge amount of fuel. Over 200 tons of uranium and plutonium are a ton down there, like a time bomb, waiting for a better solution.

Polidori let us not forget that all this is not over. Their complaint through pristine images is echoed in the work, in which art meets reality imagined unimagined, as the Californian Photographer Richard Misrach and their images of the fields of nuclear testing in the American deserts. It was not just the Ukrainians who committed these absurdities.

On his previous book, Havana, Polidori wrote that sought to extract not only the architecture that existed, but somehow, we urged to discover the souls that wander by these traces. There is this feeling in your images. We see a hospital destroyed, but the images lead us to imagine doctors and nurses working as if the lapse of time does not exist. Abandoned in the portfolios of schools can "see" the students studying.

More than 116,000 people were forced to leave Pripyat within 10 days following the accident. The effort to relocate the residents was not complete. Even with radiation, many of them returned to collect their belongings, taking back with contaminated objects. In total, more than 350,000 people had to leave, and since 1995 they are returning to unsafe places. The problem is that, for them, not just of radioactivity. The economic situation forces them to return, and they feed on fish, cattle and wild fruits contaminated. Poverty and environmental drama conspire to push them back. Even young people returned in large quantities, and a significant part of them voted to reopen the plant in 2002.

Contaminated rivers, cemeteries, ghosts of cars and homes around the region, recorded by accurate large format that highlights the nuances of the colors faded. Details thin film produced by grain expel the veins and cuts of destruction, are not just inanimate objects. They are a libel on behalf of an inheritance rather a warning to mankind. This same warning written on the board of an abandoned school in one of the photos. "There is no turning back. Goodbye. Pripyat, April 28, 1986. "

Zones of exclusion - Chernobyl and Pripyat, a book of photographs by Robert Polidori. Publisher Steidl. ISBN3-88243-021-1. Freebok : freebook@freebook.com.br

- Article published in May 2006 in Fotosite, and upgraded to the PEF blog.

Juan Esteves, photographer, has been writing his articles since 1988 in the Folha de S. Paul. It was Iris Photo Magazine columnist and editor and columnist for the Fotosite. You Better Shoot magazine columnist and contributor to text and images for magazines such as Mitsubishi, Living Alone, Travel and More Cosac Naify. Now, the blog of Paraty in Focus, called Juan, all Fridays, unpublished or published - the last, with reprint and update made ​​especially for this blog.