Chernobyl Hospital Nursery
Today’s guest post on The Chernobyl Experience is by Brook Ward (Website / Facebook / 500px / Flickr / Instagram):
Long before I’d ever heard of the HBO Chernobyl television series, I traveled to Ukraine to spend 4 days inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Here’s how that happened and what I experienced…..
Believe it or not, my Chernobyl trip started in Detroit Michigan. I got a call from a friend asking me if I’d be interested in going to Detroit with him to photography abandoned buildings. He called me because I’d been to Motown numerous times and he wanted someone with knowledge of the area…and I’m a fun guy. That conversation resulted in a group of seven photographers whom came from different parts of the United States and one person from Europe making the trip in early 2018. While in Detroit, the gentleman from Europe kept telling me about a couple of trips he made to photography Chernobyl. He was connected with a private group via social media who conduct two photography trips per year to Chernobyl. After Detroit, he got me in touch with this group as well.
As it turned out, a few weeks later the Chernobyl Photography group announced their fall 2018 dates, which worked for my schedule….so my son and I booked it immediately. I’ll admit it was a leap of faith transferring money to individuals I’d never met in advance of the trip. In my head, I could see the worst case scenario where we’d show up in Kiev to find no group and that we lost all the transferred money. By the way, this fear was stronger than my fear of anything inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. As it turned out, it was as advertised…..a group of fun like minded photographers who like Urban Exploration photography and wanted to photograph Chernobyl.
Prior to meeting up with the group, my son and I had a few days in Kiev to explore and photograph the city. It happened to be a Ukrainian National Holiday and we got to see Kiev in celebration mode.
Mariyinsky Palace
