Andrej Krementschouk - CHERNOBYL ZONE (I)

Chernobyl: once just an old-fashioned town in the Ukraine, one hundred kilometers from Kiev, today synonymous with the biggest nuclear disaster in human history. 2011 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the accident that took hundreds of lives and forced thousands of people to leave their homeland. Award-winning photographer Andrej Krementschouk (winner of the 2010 PDN Photo Annual Award) took several trips to Chernobyl, venturing into the restricted thirty-kilometer zone of alienation around the reactor. He took haunting pictures of the rural landscape, alongside touching portraits of people who refused to leave their homes despite the danger of radiation. Andrej Krementschouk's first book, No Direction Home, was a 2010 German Photo Book Award and PDN Photo Annual Award winner. His work has been exhibited at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg; the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; and the Galerie Clara Maria Sels, Dusseldorf.