1. Two days passed before the official Soviet TASS press agency released this telex announcing that there had been an accident at the nuclear power plant in Chornobyl. The statement was read on Russian evening news. Though it used soothing language, suggesting that the authorities were in control of the situation, those able to read between the lines understood that it suggested a major accident.

2. Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Ukraine, 2005 // Workers, wearing respirators and plastic suits for protection, pause briefly on their way to drill holes for support rods inside the sarcophagus. It is hazardous work: radiation is so high that they constantly need to monitor their Geiger counters and dosimeters, and they are allowed only one 15-minute stay in this space per day.

3. Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant Control Room #4, Ukraine 2023 // On April 26, 1986, operators in this control room of reactor #4 at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant committed a fatal series of errors during a safety test, triggering a reactor meltdown and explosion that resulted in the world's largest nuclear accident to date.

4. Rozsokha, Ukraine, 1993 // Thousands of highly contaminated vehicles, such as helicopters, trucks, tanks and bulldozers, were used during the cleanup following the accident and are awaiting burial in several ‘graveyards for radioactive equipment’ in the Exclusion Zone.

5. Pripyat, Ukraine, 1993 // Highly contaminated, these cars were officially destroyed and buried. However, scavengers have dug them up for usable spare parts. Originally only committed by desperate individuals, such theft was soon organized by the Kyiv mafia that sells these contaminated parts to unaware buyers.

6. Pripyat, Ukraine 2005 // On the day of the disaster children, oblivious to the nuclear accident, played in this kindergarten of the reactor’s company town. The following day they were evacuated and had to leave everything behind – even their treasured dolls and toys.

7. Pripyat, Ukraine 1993 // Wind blows through the desolate town of Pripyat. On April 26, 1986, this amusement park was being readied for the annual May Day celebrations when reactor #4 of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded less than 3 kilometers away.

8. Pripyat, Ukraine 2011 // A radiation sign along the road near Pripyat warns of the danger. The tranquility of the sight on an evening of heavy snowfall belies the lingering threat in the peaceful winter landscape.

9. Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Ukraine 2011 // Although radiation levels only allowed for a few minutes of access, workers initially had to pass over hazardous ladders to a section underneath the melted core with life-threatening contamination. In order to facilitate faster access, a daunting hallway, called "the leaning staircase" was erected.

10. Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Ukraine 2023 // The Turbine Hall of Power Unit 4 at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Station stands as a haunting relic of the catastrophic nuclear disaster that occurred on April 1986. Today, radiation levels in this area are still so high that, despite protective clothing, access is limited to just two minutes. Scientifically, the Turbine Hall's significance lies in its direct connection to the reactor's cooling and power generation systems. It played a crucial role in the events leading to the 1986 disaster, housing the steam turbines and electrical generators that converted thermal energy from the nuclear reactor into electrical energy. The loss of control by operators over the reactor led to an unprecedented power surge. This surge triggered a series of explosions, severely damaging the reactor and surrounding structures, including the Turbine Hall.

11. Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Ukraine 2013 // On April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58 a.m., a series of explosions destroyed the reactor in the building that housed Energy Block #4 of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Station. The force of the explosions literally stopped time: the rusty clock inside this room in the reactor #4 indicates the time of the explosion. Radiation here is still so high that access is limited to a few brief seconds.

12. Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Ukraine 2005 // Wearing plastic suits and respirators for protection, workers drill holes for support rods inside the shaky concrete sarcophagus, the structure hastily built after the explosion to isolate the radioactive rubble of reactor #4. Their job is to keep the deteriorating enclosure standing until the New Safe Confinement is finished. It is hazardous work: radiation inside is so high that workers can risk shifts no longer than 15 minutes per day.

13. Kyiv, Ukraine 1993 // In Kyiv, youngsters are examined for cesium-137, a long-lived carcinogenic radioisotope contaminating the soil and food chain. Ukrainians are still haunted by the specter of early deaths and disability due to the nuclear explosion, even for those who were still in their mothers' wombs at the time of the catastrophe.

14. Kyiv, Ukraine 2011 // Ukraine 2011 // Only 5 years old and suffering from leukemia, Veronika Chechet is hospitalized at the Center for Radiation Medicine in Kyiv, a clinic specializing in the treatment of victims of the Chornobyl accident and related ailments. Veronika’s mother Yelena Medeyeva, 29 was born 4 years before the Chornobyl accident in Chernihiv, a city heavily affected by nuclear fall-out. According to doctors at the hospital, many patients’ conditions are a direct result of the radioactivity released after the accident.

15. Teremtsy, Ukraine 2011 // 92 year-old Kharytina Descha is one of the few elderly people who have returned to their village homes inside the Exclusion Zone. As she has difficulties walking and hearing she does not have much communication with anybody in the village but seems to be quite content with her situation. After the catastrophe, close to 100,000 inhabitants who lived in villages inside the 30km Zone were evacuated. Ignoring radiation levels, a (now diminishing) number of elderly people have returned to their homes. Although surrounded by devastation and isolation, they prefer to die on their own soil rather than of a broken heart in anonymous city suburbs. At first Ukrainian officials discouraged them, but soon they turned a blind eye.

16-18. [re]vision: Still Life in Chornobyl // In 2011, as people around the world watched TV reports about a widening nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, Japan, the Ukrainian government legalized trips to the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, turning it into a disaster-tourism destination. This continued until it was abruptly ended by the Russian invasion. The most riveting attraction for visitors had been the ghost town of Pripyat. Formerly home to almost 50,000 people, Pripyat is now in decay: dolls are scattered in abandoned kindergartens, floors are rotting, paint is peeling from the walls, and gas masks litter evacuated schools. While the accident itself created chaos of apocalyptic magnitude, three decades later, tourists and guides were creating another bewildering disturbance, albeit naively seeking to articulate a deeper understanding. First came the scavengers, who stripped the rooms of valuables; later came illegal intruders like taggers, and finally, the tourists with their guides who assembled tableaux to illustrate the flight from disaster. Books are still opened to pages depicting Marx or Lenin. A child’s chair sits in front of a piano, though from its heights no child could have reached the keys. And the most repeated motif: a lonely doll neatly arranged next to a gas mask. With limited time in the zone, the visitors often added to or altered existing arrangements, creating compositions designed to be photographed close-up—and they were, by countless cameras and phones. While we instinctively consider such tinkering disrespectful, we can also view the arrangements as a naive attempt to tell the horror of an age-old story; the cautionary tale that man should not build what he can’t control.

19. Ilyintsy, Ukraine, 2005 // Deaf couple Gapa and Ivan enjoy a lighthearted moment after a few glasses of moonshine at their village home inside the Exclusion Zone. Ignoring radiation levels, several hundred elderly men and women returned to their homes within the Exclusion Zone following the government evacuation order, preferring familiarity and health risks to relocation.

20. Nova Krasnitsya, Ukraine, 2005 // Sunlight hits a deteriorating statue of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, commonly known as Lenin, the Soviet Union’s first leader, this outside a house of culture inside the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, which opened for guided tours for a few years until the Russian invasion. Much like this statue, the sixteen Soviet republics crumbled from his ideology.

21. Chornobyl, Ukraine 2005 // To commemorate the 19th anniversary of the nuclear disaster on April 26, 1986, shift workers of Chornobyl gather at 1:23 a.m. local time in a candle light vigil around the Monument to the Firemen. Enduring major doses of radiation, firemen were among the most severely affected victims of the explosion.

Gerd Ludwig was born in Alsfeld, Germany. After traveling and supporting himself with jobs as a bricklayer, sailor, gardener and dishwasher, he returned to Germany to study photography for five years with Professor Otto Steinert at the Folkwang-Hochschule (now Folkwang University of the Arts). In 1975 he co-founded VISUM, Germany’s first photographer-owned photo agency and began working for Geo, Stern, Spiegel, Zeit-Magazin, Time, and Life, as well as photographing advertising campaigns.

After moving to the USA in the early 1990s Ludwig signed on as a contract photographer for National Geographic Magazine, focusing on environmental issues and the social changes in Germany and Eastern Europe. This work resulted in the publication of his book, Broken Empire: After the Fall of the USSR, a ten-year retrospective published by National Geographic in 2001.

Many of the photographs presented here were originally published in his book “The Long Shadow of Chernobyl”, Edition Lammerhuber, 2014. The significance of Ludwig’s work is underscored by Mikhail Gorbachev’s foreword, in which he writes: “The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, even more than my launch of Perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later. Indeed, the Chernobyl catastrophe was an historic turning point: there was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that has followed.” 

On April 17, 2024, Ludwig’s new book, “Beuys Land”, based on his travels with Joseph Beuys visiting Kleve, Beuys' hometown in the Lower Rhine Valley,
is being released at the Museum Kurhaus, Kleve.

*A note as to place names: we have used the Ukrainian spellings for Chornobyl and Kyiv but retained the spellings of locations and names as they were used in the original 2014 publication.

All photos © Gerd Ludwig