Descendants – The Shadow of Chernobyl
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Our trip starts from Gomel, Belarus and goes through the exclusion zone, through half-empty cities, forests, broken roads and abandoned villages. We visit few old people who survived life in the ‘Death Valley’. They are silent and very touching. They drink a lot. As we leave the Zone, villages pass by the windows of the car – all with irreparable signs of decline: only the elderly live here, and it is just matter of time until they disappear from the map. What haven’t been destroyed by radiation and fear, will be destroyed by time. We visit orphanages where abandoned children with congenital deceases live, we see families where parents still struggle with poverty, unfairness and violent common sense to keep their terminally children alive until the last minute of hope…
All Photographs and text by Mstyslav Chernov