In the essay, “The Rites of Return,” Askold Melnyczuk states: “The word Chernobyl itself means wormwood, an ingredient in absinthe, and is also the name of the star that falls to earth in the Book of Revelation, poisoning a third of the world’s waters.” Melnyczuk provides a brief summary of the book, in which he writes, “The despair is evident in Jim Krantz’s haunted photographs – of abandoned rooms, a crucified shirt, a battered cello. There’s a man sobbing on a bed; a hallway of broken windows and blown leaves; a heap of books piled as though for a bond fire…. But there are other aspects: people smiling at each other; the splintered buildings and shattered machines slowly being re-upholstered in green…” Hence, some of the images convey a sense of hope through the use of green grass and foliage.

Krantz excels at “photographic seeing” and uses his skill, learned in part from master photographers such as Ansel Adams, to focus on the devastating results of the disaster. As John Szarkowski said in his epic work, Looking at Photographs, 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art (1973): “The seemingly arbitrary cropping of figures by the picture edge, the unexpected shapes created by overlapping forms, the asymmetrical and centrifugal patterning, then juxtaposition of busy and empty masses – these qualities constitute a visual definition of what is meant, in large part, by the phrase ‘photographic seeing'”(p. 22).

Curtain Vista
© Jim Krantz
— FROM Homage: Remembering Chernobyl

In the book some images are contorted, blurred, or sometimes titled on their axes, all in an effort to remind us of this human and environmental tragedy. We see in the very first image a view through a screened window. Three birds in the upper left corner are flying out of the picture, a single smoke stack stands in the distance, and green foliage comprises the right and bottom of the landscape. With this image, as with all of them, there are no captions or explanations. The viewer is left to determine his/her own response, unencumbered by language.

The second image shows four coats and a shirt hanging on a shed wall. Were they abandoned when the fallout drove the inhabitants from the area? We don’t know, but Krantz darkened the four corners of the photo to focus the viewer’s eyes to the center of the image, which captured dull green and gray hues, as well as brown-red boards, creating a sense of abandonment.

Another photograph shows three youngsters in silhouette against a dark grey-blue sky. They appear to be riding their bicycles toward the photographer, with one reaching out to his companion on his right, a playful gesture. My own emotional response: life goes on, but under a dark-sky world which spells an unnatural bleakness.

One image is a close rear-view of a man with a yellow cap walking toward a building. He is out of focus, but the building, which looks like a barn or farm structure, is in focus. The axis of the picture is tilted counter-clockwise. The picture seems to say, this man doesn’t see straight, or at least walk straight, implying the man is intoxicated. Other images in the book show men drinking, such as the orange-hued image of a man toasting the photographer. The man’s face cannot be seen, hidden as it is by the bottle of booze he holds in his toast to the camera.

In another gripping photo, two male faces look directly at the camera. The first is cut off from the nose down to the throat, and seems to be smiling, but is very out of focus. The second male face, to the right and rear of the first, is in focus; that man’s expression is glum.

The images stand alone to create a loving, yet haunting, ordinariness of these people in a simple, ghostly place.

Like the photographer Lewis W. Hine, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who introduced Paul Strand to photography, Hine realized that if his photos were to “contribute to social change they must first affect the sensibilities of those who saw them,” noted Szarkowski (p. 60). Like Hine, much of Krantz’s work is a celebration of common people, although many of them appear to be intoxicated, or suffering the results of considerable drinking (p. 60).

Many of his images seem as if they were snapshots, but use the outside edges, the “crop” to encapsulate an idea, a person, in this desolated land, and brings his viewers to focus on who is the person, what is he or she doing here. The images stand alone to create a loving, yet haunting, ordinariness of these people in a simple, ghostly place.

Krantz follows in a long tradition of individuals who have sought to wake up society to the negative impacts from nuclear energy. John Hersey did so in his famous work Hiroshima. Hersey did it with word pictures. Others have used other mediums such as film and painting, but Krantz celebrates the living who have struggled to carry on in the 19-mile zone of death we think of when we conjure up the remnants of Chernobyl.

Szarkowski quotes Henri Cartier-Bresson as saying that photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and which no contrivance on earth can bring back again. Not even photography can bring these things back, except in the memory of those who knew them, or in the imaginations of those who did not (p. 124).

Krantz had a very difficult assignment. How do you memorialize an event that happened 25 years ago, and was largely unseen in its destructiveness? There was a fire, but no devastated city like Hiroshima or Nagasaki. In short, Krantz had to record the effects of an unseen demon, nuclear radiation, that swept across the land, as if the hand of God, or the Devil, had laid waste to a region, a people.

Because he is a photographer, Krantz knows that he must work closely to create a series of images that will work like a montage on the mind of his audience. The book does this, absorbing as a whole to receive the impact sought by the photographer. The individual images are powerful, but it is in their collective entirety that the viewer begins to experience vicariously the devastation. And, like every good documentarian, Krantz conveys his point of view, yet gets out of the way to let his subjects tell their stories. It is not an easy feat. Krantz succeeds very well indeed.