Photographers recall Chernobyl’s first days
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster will be Tuesday the 26th. Anna Melnichuk of the Associated Press wrote a piece today about the photographers who first went to the site after the event.
Wearing a lead protective suit and placing his cameras in lead boxes, photographer Igor Kostin made a terrifying and unauthorized trip to the Chernobyl danger zone just a few days after a nuclear power plant reactor exploded in the world’s worst atomic accident.
He came back home with nothing to show for his determination to document the crisis — the radiation was so high that all his shots turned out black.
How’s that for a hook?
“They counted the seconds for me: one, two, three … As they said ‘20’ I had to run down from the roof. It was the most contaminated place, with 1,500 Roentgen per hour. The deadly dose is 500 Roentgen,” Kostin told The Associated Press. “Fear came later.”