Two items of cult fixation collide in these photos of illicit exploration (1) into the irradiated exclusion zone around Pripyat (2) in northern Ukraine. According to English Russia the crew are a group of urban explorers from St Petersburg. The English Russia pages have two sets of photos with English annotations while the explorers themselves document their adventures to Pripyat (and elsewhere) in Russian at LiveJournal, here and here. (Google Translate works pretty well for the captions there.) Great photos in all of their posts. The shot above would be ideal as a wraparound cover for an edition of Roadside Picnic.
Official visits to the area now seem more common, and no doubt avoid the hazard of having to take drinking water from potentially toxic rivers. The Pripyat website advises on the pros and cons of the different seasons. Don’t forget your dosimeter.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Zone music
• Sine Fiction
• Chernobyl’s zone of alienation
• Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side Of “Stalker”
• The slow death of modernism
• The Stalker meme
Your Pripyat/Roadside Picnic affiliated posts are common enough that I don’t really wish to dig through them to see if I’d shown you this before or not. I know I’ve shown this to several others. Its an ongoing webcomic, not directly related to either yet definitely treading similar terrain.
http://romanticallyapocalyptic.com/archives
If I have then disregard it.