In 2010 and then in 2011, 25 years after the explosion of Reactor Number 4 at the then-Soviet Chernobyl nuclear power plant, located 3 kilometers from the city of Pripyat and approximately 130 kilometers from Kyiv, Marc Jeudy, the Burgundian photographer from Villecomte, produced, near the site of the worst civilian nuclear disaster in our history, a remarkable black-and-white analog reportage in 6×6 format. Today he shares these important photographs with us.
With the help of his Ukrainian stepdaughter’s father, he was able to approach, not without risk, the site of the terrible 30-kilometer exclusion zone demarcated all around the nuclear power plant, which became Ukrainian in 1991 when the USSR broke up, but which, since 2022, has come under the control of Russian armed forces.
To capture the images presented here, Marc had no special protection at the time; only a Geiger radioactivity detector allowed him to assess the radioactive conditions as he progressed and advanced little by little over the contaminated ground. At the end of the route, we stood upright, our whole bodies scanned, hands in the air, as in a radiology booth that detected radioactivity. In the evening, he says: “as one final precaution, I forced myself to take a shower!”
Even today, he remembers every stage of his entire journey. A very particular undertaking in that hell, he says, simply to bear witness, if necessary — he whose entire life as an artist, photographer and portraitist had been wholly devoted to calmly and passionately capturing, in the studio as well as outdoors, the faces, portraits and expressions of those who, one day, decided to take the step and push open the door of his workshop / studio to come and “pose” serenely before his lens, a privileged moment in their lives. That was there, rue des Godrans, in the very center of Dijon.
As we can see, this is an entirely different approach from the one in which, this time, Marc decided with courage to approach dangerously, almost like a war reporter, this cursed place, now forbidden to humans, whose natural environment was, on that day of April 26, 1986, at 1:23 a.m., forever completely devastated and definitively wiped off the map.
Some of his photographs are truly poignant; they were captured, let us say, incognito in these places totally contaminated by the nuclear accident.
Since then, some of his photographs have been exhibited in Is-sur-Tille, then at the Ukrainian Embassy in Paris, and finally at the Rencontres photographiques de Chabeuil in the Drôme.
To speak of this disaster again today through Marc’s images is, for him, both a commitment and an important duty of remembrance, a tribute to all those who, for many different reasons, lost their lives during and after this terrible nuclear catastrophe. In total, 200,000 people would be permanently evacuated from the zone around this Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
Marc Jeudy stayed in the area to bear witness, once for three days and the second time for four days.
Jacques Revon
Honorary journalist, author, photographer.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Revon
