Pictures that gave world first glimpse of nuclear disaster

WEARING a lead protective suit and placing his cameras in lead boxes, photographer Igor Kostin made a terrifying trip to the Chernobyl danger zone just a few days after the nuclear power plant reactor exploded there in the world's worst atomic accident.

• Igor Kostin shows a photograph taken in the first days after the explosion of the 4th reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Kostin made a terrifying and unauthorized trip to the Chernobyl danger zone just a few days after a nuclear power plant reactor exploded. Picture: AP

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.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

But Kostin quickly returned and his work, along with that of a handful of other daring photographers, was critical to the world's understanding of a catastrophe that Soviet authorities were reluctant to admit.

Tomorrow marks 25 years since the 26 April, 1986 blast that spewed radioactive fall-out over much of Europe. Kostin's memories are as vivid and terrifying as any photo. They carry an added chill as Japan struggles to bring its Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant under control after last month's earthquake and tsunami triggered the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

On his first trip into the Ukrainian danger zone, the photographer for the Novosti Press Agency talked his way aboard military conveyances. He recalls hearing alarmingly high radiation readings from the pilot: "A tightly closed armoured troop carrier, a helicopter floor covered with lead, windows closed tightly. Ruins of the reactor on the right. A pilot's voice - '50 metres to the reactor, 250 roentgen'. I opened the window and was shooting. It was a stupid thing."

Those were the shots that showed nothing.

But a few days after the blast, authorities allowed Kostin and two other photographers - Valery Zufarov and Volodymyr Repik - to get terrifyingly close.

Kostin, now 74, was with a group of "liquidators," soldiers who had been pressed into service to battle the disaster.

He climbed to the roof of the building next to the exploded reactor, firing off frames to record the soldiers who were frantically shovelling debris off the roof.

He had to shoot fast. "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 said. "Fear came later."

"It was like another dimension: ruins of the reactor, people in face masks, refugees. It all resembled war," he said.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Kostin said that being a photographer was like being a hunter. But, after his Chernobyl ordeal: "Now I know what a victim feels while being followed by an invisible, inaudible and thus even more dangerous enemy."

Kostin's work in the days after the blast and in subsequent years on Chernobyl won him a World Press Photo Prize. It also exposed him to heavy levels of radiation and he has undergone several thyroid operations over the years.

Kostin is the best-known of the Chernobyl disaster photographers, but Anatoly Rasskazov (pictured above left) was the first. As a staff photographer for the plant, he was allowed in on the day of the explosion. On 26 April, at noon - hours after the blast - he made a video of the destroyed reactor and submitted it to a special commission working in a bunker close to the plant, said Anna Korolevska, deputy director of Chernobyl museum in Kiev. Rasskazov's photos were submitted to the commission by 11pm on the same day - and were immediately seized by the Soviet secret police. Only two of his photos were published in 1987, without mentioning the author's name.Rasskazov died last year, aged 66, after suffering for years from cancer and blood diseases that he blamed on the radiation. Zufarov died in 1993, aged 52, of Chernobyl-related disease.

On 12 May, 1986, more than two weeks after the explosion, the leading Soviet daily newspaper Pravda published its first photograph from the site, shot by Repik

"If I had been ordered now to get aboard and go, I would not have gone - you might have easily died there for nothing," said the 65-year-old Repik.

Related topics: