The Chernobyl Landscape and the Aesthetics of Invisibility

This article reflects upon the dilemma of representing nuclear catastrophe in photography. As the vast number of photographs from the restricted zone around Chernobyl show, the intention to produce such an image is always faced with the fact that the actual radioactive threat remains invisible. The article presents the photographic strategies used by art, journalism, and tourism to represent Chernobyl in order to critically point out approaches that confront this dilemma of visibility. The first model is iconographic, involving symbolic depictions of landscape, whereas the second is material, striving to display invisible radioactive radiation photochemically. All these strategies reflect futile attempts to represent the invisible component of the landscape that marks its dichotomy between rural aesthetics and lethal contamination. In the photographic adoption, the accident is ironically transformed into a superhuman natural catastrophe.