Between the Pripyat River and the Belarusian border lies a tract of land that the state declared unfit for human habitation after April 1986. Yet some hundred and forty people chose to remain within what is now the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, tending gardens and keeping houses on soil that is still severely contaminated. Esther Hessing photographed them, together with the workers of the still-operating nuclear plant and the purpose-built town of Slavutych, where many of those workers live. Bound to the Ground, published by Eriskay Connection in 2016, gathers that work into three parts: the self-settlers in their gardens and homes; a historical section on the disaster and the abandoned city of Pripyat, written by Alexander Münninghoff; and a closer view of Slavutych, the ‘city of the future’ built to rehouse plant workers after the accident. The book is trilingual in the sense of English and Dutch, the two languages in which its text appears.
Hessing’s earlier work often returns to the attachments that bind people to a particular place, and here the question becomes sharp and moral: how strong is the pull of home ground when that ground is dangerous? The photographs refuse both sentimentality and catastrophe. They are patient with ordinary life—a fence, a face, a kitchen, a field—and they let the larger institutional reality, the reactor and the protected perimeter, remain a quiet pressure rather than a spectacle. Sophieke Thurmer’s reporting, based on repeated visits with Hessing, provides the testimonies that frame the pictures; the book’s social emphasis is what distinguishes it from the many other titles about Chernobyl.
For collectors, the book is worth attention less for any claim of scarcity than for how its parts are made to speak to one another. Rob van Hoesel and Carel Fransen designed a sequence that moves from intimate settlement, through the archival and remembered past, to the constructed present of Slavutych, so that the landscape is never just background. The photographs, printed in a softcover volume of 136 pages with a generous 23.5 by 31.2 centimetre page, are given room to work slowly. Put beside the standard photojournalism on the zone, this is a book about staying rather than leaving, and about the ways a community can be defined by its eventual disappearance. It belongs in a collection that takes the long view of European landscape photography and its documentary responsibilities.
