Over 20 years, Gerd Lud­wig has been re­port­ing on the af­ter­math of the nu­clear cat­a­stro­phe in Cher­nobyl. He first pho­tographed in the ex­clu­sion zone in 1993 for Na­tional Ge­o­graphic Mag­a­zine and re­turned in 2005 for a cover story, bring­ing him deeper into the con­t­a­m­i­nated Re­ac­tor No. 4 than any west­ern still pho­tog­ra­pher.

In 2011‒2014, thanks to suc­cess­ful crowd­fund­ing cam­paigns, Lud­wig re­turned to Cher­nobyl to con­tinue his cov­er­age as a per­sonal pro­ject. Soon after, he began work on his ret­ro­spec­tive book, pub­lished by Edi­tion Lam­mer­hu­ber. The in­tro­duc­tory essay for this book was writ­ten by Mikhail Gor­bachev.

Lud­wig’s pro­ject is not mere doc­u­men­ta­tion but rather a deep analy­sis of the af­ter­math of the nu­clear cat­a­stro­phe, still af­fect­ing the so­cial, eco­log­i­cal, and phys­i­cal well-being of peo­ple. The ex­hi­bi­tion will pre­sent sev­eral se­ries by Lud­wig, ded­i­cated to the nu­clear power sta­tion, the town of Pripyat and its sur­round­ings, local in­hab­i­tants and their chil­dren, who have suf­fered ra­di­a­tion ex­po­sure. The long shadow of Cher­nobyl is still being cast over human lives.

An ex­cerpt from the book The Long Shadow of Cher­nobyl by Gerd Lud­wig:

“An eas­ing of the bu­reau­cratic bar­ri­ers helped me to ven­ture deeper into the re­ac­tor than any west­ern still pho­tog­ra­pher. After don­ning my pro­tec­tive gear, state-of-the-art Geiger counter, dosime­ters and an extra layer of 3-4 mm thick plas­tic over­alls, I fol­lowed a group of six work­ers into the belly of the beast. The work­ers, as­signed to drill holes in the con­crete to sta­bi­lize the roof, ad­di­tion­ally wore gas masks and oxy­gen tanks. We had to move fast. The ra­di­a­tion lev­els in this area are so high that, de­spite our pro­tec­tive gear, ac­cess was lim­ited to a max­i­mum of 15 min­utes per day.

It was the most chal­leng­ing pho­to­graphic sit­u­a­tion I’ve ever en­coun­tered. The space was dark, loud, and claus­tro­pho­bic; we rushed through dimly lit tun­nels strewn with wires, pieces of shred­ded metal and other de­bris, and I strug­gled not to trip; while pho­tograph­ing I needed to dodge the spray of sparks from the drillers in highly con­t­a­m­i­nated con­crete dust; and I knew that I had less than 15 min­utes to cap­ture ar­rest­ing im­ages of an en­vi­ron­ment that few have ever seen, and that I might never ac­cess again. The adren­a­line surge was ex­tra­or­di­nary. To ex­ac­er­bate the sit­u­a­tion, after lit­tle more than halfway through the al­lot­ted shift, our Geiger coun­ters and dosime­ters began beep­ing – an eerie con­cert re­mind­ing us that our time was up. Torn be­tween my nat­ural in­stincts to sur­vive and my de­sire as a pho­tog­ra­pher to stay longer, it was chal­leng­ing to stay fo­cused and work ef­fi­ciently and fast, but with­out haste.”

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