In pictures: Dark Pripyat
- Published
For five years Ric Wright photographed abandoned and forgotten places around his home, but in 2010 he decided to look further afield and headed for the exclusion zone around the nuclear plant at Chernobyl in Ukraine where an explosion and subsequent reactor meltdown became the world's worst-ever nuclear accident.
Wright has visited a number of times and so far has spent nine days in the zone where he has concentrated on photographing the abandoned town of Pripyat, once home to the plant's workers and their families. The town's 49,000 inhabitants were told to leave 36 hours after the explosion on 26 April 1986.
"The Ferris wheel in central Pripyat is probably one of the most known items in images from the town," said Wright. The amusement park was due to open on 1 May 1986, five days after the disaster, but it has never been used.
Many Soviet artworks are still in Pripyat, from murals to paintings and peeling posters. The painting featured here is in the post office.
This is a classroom at one of the 21 schools in town. Wright said: "Most of the classrooms have been raided but some remain with most of their desks and some items in place."
"I had seen this riverboat on satellite imagery and wanted to get some shots of it first hand," said Wright. "The boat would have been permanently moored to the riverside and acted as a house or floating restaurant, but at some point during the last 27 years its lines have broken and it has drifted into the riverbank."
Pripyat's concert hall now lies abandoned. The photographic project has been published as an ebook that also contains a soundtrack, some of which includes a recital of the sheet music found in this music hall.
Here you can see the Cultural Palace on the right, various other shops and restaurants and the 17-storey buildings in which most people lived. Each one is topped with a Soviet symbol.
"One of the well-known sites in Pripyat is the swimming pool which has been featured in many video games, namely Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare and the Stalker series," said Wright.
Many of the contaminated vehicles used in the clean-up operation remain in equipment graveyards in the exclusion zone. Here at Burakivka some of those vehicles continue to decay. Many of the trucks have had their engines and wiring removed.
"Yanov Train station is the last stop which serviced the city of Pripyat and is to the south-west of the city", said Wright. "Most of the population of Pripyat were evacuated from here."
"Another way of looking at the desolation of Pripyat is how things could be in 27 years at other sites around the world, such as the area around Fukushima in Japan, as well as how the world would look after more than 25 years without human intervention, when nature reclaims cities", said Wright.